"Readings in

Itali an Mannerism J;

Liana De Girolami Cheney, Editor

with a Foreword by Craig Hugh Smyth

PETER LANG
New York· Washington, D.C.lBaltimore
Bern- Frankfurt am Main· Berlin> Vienna- Paris
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Readings in Italian mannerismJ Liana De Girolami Cheney, editor.
p. cm. - (American university studies, XX, Fine arts; v. 24)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Mannerism (Art)-Italy. 2. Art, Italian. I. Cheney, Liana. II. Series;
American university studies. Series XX, Fine arts; vol. 24.
N6915.5.M3R43 709'.45·09031---<1c21 96·48734
ISBN 0·8204·2483·8
ISSN 0890·421 X

Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Readings in Italian mannerism!
Liana De Girolami Cheney, editor. -New York; Washington, D.C.!
Baltimore; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Vienna; Paris; Lang.
(American university studies: Ser. 20, Fine arts; Vol. 24)
ISBN 0·8204·2483·8
NE; Cheney, Liana De Girolami [Hrsg.J; American university studies/20

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii

FOREWORD
Craig Hugh Smyth xxiii

PREFACE
Liana De Girolami Cheney xxv

INTRODUCTION - STYLISTIC PROBLEMS IN

MANNERISM AND MANIERA
Liana De Girolami Cheney l

VASARI'S POSITION AS AN EXPONENT OF THE

MANIERA STYLE
Liana De Girolami Cheney 9

PREFACE TO THE THIRD PART

Giorgio Vasari 27

MANIERA AS AN AESTHETIC IDEAL

John Shearman 35

MANNERISM AND MANIERA

Craig Hugh Smyth ···· 69

OBSERVATIONS ON THE PAINTING OF THE

MANIERA
Sydney J. Freedberg l13
""'-- - -----------

xii

MANNERISM AND ANTI-MANNERISM IN ITALIAN

PAINTING
Walter F. Friedlaender 143

EL GRECO AND MANNERISM

Max Dvorak 193

MANNERISM: THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC

BACKGROUND
Ernst Hans Gombrich 213

OBSERVATIONS ON THE USE OF THE CONCEPT

OF MANNERISM
Henri Zemer 227

MANNERISM, ITALIAN STYLE

Malcolm Campbell 247

MANIERA AND MOVEMENT: THE FIGURE

SERPENTINATA
David Sumrners 273

MANNERIST ART: SURVIVAL AND

COLLECTION
Iris Hofmeister Cheney 315

BIBLIOGRAPHy 323

INDEX .337
MANIERA AND MOVEMENT: THE FIGURE SERPENT INAT A

David Summers

The term figura serpentinata appears once in Cinquecento art

theory: it was attributed to Michelangelo by G. P. Lomazzo in his
Trattato dell' ATte de la Piitura, published in 1584. Since Lomazzo
was the most compendious spokesman of mannerism and since he
associated the figura serpentinaia with Michelangelo, it was
inevitable that the idea should have taken an important place in
the discussion of sixteenth-century art and theory. But its fame
was assured-and its subsequent interpretation pretty much
determined-when it was chanced upon by Hogarth, who made it
the emblem and governing idea for his Analysis of Beauty,
published in 1753. Hogarth considerably elaborated "the precept
which Michelangelo delivered so long ago in an oracle-like
manner" and spun meanings around the few cryptic words which
were far from either Lomazzo's or Michelangelo's intentions. He
illustrated the first two terms of Lomazzo's introductory phrase-
that the painter "should always make a figure pyramidal,
Serpent-like and multiplied by one two and three"-with a
diminishing helix, gotten by the slow, regular movement of a point
around a cone'! Visible liOdieS, Hogarth believed, should be
regar<ied as surfaces made up of lines, of which the most beautiful
was the serPentine line this, "by its waving and winding at the
same ume in different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner
along the continuity of its variety ... see where that sort of
proportional, winding line, or line of grace, is represented by a fine
wire, properly twisted round the elegant and varied figure of a
cone."2 As we shall shortly see, there is no real basis in Lomazzo's
text for this linear but three-dimensional visualization of the figura
serpentinata. Nevertheless, this interpretation has become the usual
one, and consequently the figura serpentinata has come to be used
 274

almost exclusively in reference to sculpture. Such a reading has

been fortified by the association of the "continuity of the variety"
of the serpentine line in three dimensions with a second tenet of
Late Renaissance art, that a sculpture should be able to be seen
from an infinite number of points of view. Giovanni Bologna's Rape
of the Sabine Woman, carved at almost the same time Lomazzo's
treatise was published, has become the usual example of what a
serpentine composition is thought to be-Panofsky, for instance,
understood the term in this way when he made the figura
serpentinata the formal paradigm for what he called "manneristic
sculpture."3 Most recently Shearman, who also regards the ftgura
serpentinata as one of the characteristic forms of the mannerist
style, has followed Lomazzo in crediting the form's invention to
Michelangelo, seeing Michelangelo's Victory of about 1530 as its
first example.s
Hogarth's interpretation of the serpentine figure has at least as
much to do with the eighteenth century as with the sixteenth. Karl
Birch-Hirschfeld, writing on Lomazzo about 1912, offered a
considerably different reading of Lomazzo's text. He recognized
that theftgura serpentinata, although the term itself may have been
newly minted, is related to a formula for the movement of figures
which appears with some frequency in Cinquecento theory and
was everywhere evident in practice.s Birch-Hirschfeld's
connection of Lomazzo's figura serpentinata with a wider
theoretical tradition-which is certainly correct-requires that the
genesis and significance of the serpentine figure be reconsidered. It
will be seen that the figura serpentinata was not invented by
Michelangelo, although it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that
Michelangelo was the source for Lomazzo's record of it and may
have given it its name. The degree to which Lomazzo may have
embroidered his source, or mixed it with others, is difficult to
determine precisely. But we know from Condivi's biography that
 275

Michelangelo addressed himself seriously to the problem of a

theory of movement, and no Cinquecento theory of movement
would have been complete without a treatment of the figura
serpentinata. As I think will be evident from an examination of his
painting and sculpture, such an omission would have been
especially unthinkable in a treatise by Michelangelo.
Twice Lomazzo discusses the figura serpentinata at length in
the course of his book. It is first mentioned in the opening pages.
After defining the nature of painting, and establishing it to his
satisfaction as a liberal art, Lomazzo turns to the problem of
proportion, which is discussed in close connection with decorum.
He begins by fixing the limits of license,clarifying Horace's dictum
that painters and poets have equal license to do as they like, with
the condition that license cannot be based on ignorance but rather
demands learning and experience. The painter must know
proportion. "In addition to this the painter ought to use
proportionate Lineswith a certain mode and rule, nothing else than
that used and followed by nature herself in making her
compositions matter is presupposed first of all it is a thing
without form, without beauty, without definition into matter the
artist introduces form, which is a beautiful and definite thing."6
Lornazzo then describes in a most interesting fashion how the
painter, beginning with a blank canvas, "embellishes" it, "forming
and polishing" the things placed upon it,
and in sum i.mit;lting with lines the nature or the thing that he
aints# 50 in br adth as in length. \'II ight and size. Ancfbecause
h, this place a pr~ept or Michelj)~gel0 i~most <lppropriate, I
will not neglect. Simply to refer to It, 1 aVlng the interpretation
and underslllnding of II to th prudent reader.

It is SOlid tholt Mich langelo once gave this advice to the painter
Marco da Siena, his disciple, that h ought always to make the
figure PYTa,!"ida~ serpenlin?te, and multiplied by one, two or
three. And. '". thiS precept It seems to me consists the whole
secret of pambng. ~au~ the gre.llest gm.ce and loveliness that
a figure may have IS that It seem to move Itself painters call this
the JuriP of the figure. And to represeu this movement, no form is
 276

more suited than a flame of fire, which, as Aristotle and an the

philosophers say, is the most active of the elements, and the form
IS the most apt of all forms to movement, because it has a corte,
and sharp point, with which it seems to w~nt to r~nd the al!,
and ascend to its sphere. So that when the figure will have this
form it will be most beautiful One may go about it in two ways
one is that the point of the pyramid be located above, and the
base ... be located in the lower part, as in a flame .. .it ought to
grow finer after the fashion of a pyramid, showing one shoulder
and making the other recede, and be foreshortened, so that the
body is twisted, and the one shoulder hidden, while the other is
revealed. The painted figure may also stand like a pyramid that
has the base ... turned upwards, and the point downwards so
that the figure will show breadth in the upper part, either
showing both the shoulders, or extending the arms, or showing
one leg and hiding the other, as the wise painter will judge best.
But because there are two sorts of pyramids, one straight, like
that called the pyramid of Julius Caesar, near St. Peter's in
Rome, and the other the shape of a flame of fire, which
Michelangelo calls serpentinate, the painter must couple the
pyramidal form with the serpentine form, that represents the
tortuosity of a live serpent when it moves, which is the proper
form of a flame of fire that undulates. This is to say that the
figure ought to represent the form of an upright letter S, or the
form inverted ... because then it will have beauty. And not only
in the whole ought one to observe this form but also in each of
the parts. For in the legs one muscle protrudes while the other
that responds to it, and is opposed to it by a diametrical line, is
drawn in, as is seen in the feet and legs in nature.7

The close of this passage, where Lomazzo speaks of the

counter-position of parts in movement, leads directly to his
second treatment of the figura serpentinatas This second treatment
is much less confusing: Lomazzo avoids the repetitiveness of the
first account and abandons the explanatory pyramid altogether
the concetto of the flame, with all its philosophical and poetic
suggestiveness, is also abandoned.9 The association of the ftgura
serpentinata with Michelangelo is as strongly stated in Lomazzo's
second telling as it was in the first but in the second version
Lomazzo is much more intent upon explaining what a serpentine
figure is than upon explaining what it means, and consequently
there is an important difference in emphasis.
In this second discussion, in Book VI, Chapter 4 of his treatise,
Lomazzo sets out to provide a cogent theory of movement. He
 277

begins by listing the eight kinds of movement-upwards,

downwards, right, left, away from, toward, turning and
standing-and continues immediately with a description of
classical conirapposto: "... a man will stand Ifermera] with all his
weight on one foot, and that foot (I mean the instep) is always
exactly beneath the hollow of his throat, in the manner of the base
of a column. The ancient Polykleitos (following in the steps of
Nature) was the discoverer of this posture.r"? Thus contrapposio, it
is important to note, is the basis for the discussion that follows, in
which Lomazzo, in words very similar to Leonardo's notes on the
same theme, reduces all movement to the balance of opposing
weights." Statement of this principle leads in turn to a long list of
possible and impossible movements (e.g., the head cannot be
turned past the line of the shoulders, a man cannot touch his navel
with his knee).12 Finally Lomazzo concludes that his
prescriptions do not cover all movements, which

are much varied among themselves, according to the qualities of

bodies for it is proper that in a figure at rest upon one foot, the
members will De higher on the Side upon which he rests thi3:n
upon the other. Moreover, all the aforesaid movements (matt),
with so many others that may be made, should always be
represented in such a way that the body is serpentinate, to
which Nature is easily disposed. Also it has always been used
by the ancients, and by the best modems in all the a~tsthat the
figure may do, the twistings (rauueigimenti} of figures are
always seen done in such a way that if the arm thrusts forward
for the right part (or whatever attitude seems best to you) and
the other part of the body is lost [to sight], the left arm o,beys the
right, and so the left leg comes forward, and the other IS lost to
sight. The same must be observed if you wish to make the left
arm thrust forward, and so the right leg, because the right arm
must obey the left, and the other side of the body ~ust be dra~n
back. This should be followed in whatev~r actt~n ISdo£:,e, lymg
as well as running, flying, fighting, ,standmg still, kneeling, and
in short in whatever purpose ~o.whlch a body maybe tum~, It
will never have gracefulness If It doe,S not have this serpentine
form, as Michelangelo wished to call It.
 278

There follow a few sentences on the appropriateness of fat

and thin bodies to movement. Of special interest is the statement
that old and weak bodies "serpentize" (serpenteggiuno) less than
young ones.P
It is simpler to illustrate Lomazzo's general formula than it is
to rephrase it. Of the hundreds of works that could be cited, the
statuette held by Alessandro Vittoria in Veronese's portrait in the
Metropolitan Museum may serve as an unambiguous and perhaps
academic example of the figura serpentinata (Fig. 1).
The formula far graceful movement given by Lomazzo at the
end of his discussion of movement is the mast complete definition
of a figural cantrapposto or, to use the term's synonym in rhetorical
theory, an antithesis.ls All symmetrically related parts, arms and
legs-as well as parts of the body on the same side, are in
opposition to one another if this formula is followed. Now the
term contrappasto has a fairly limited meaning in current art-
historical usage: it denotes a construction of the human posture in
which the standing figure shifts its weight, departing from the
static balance of a strictly symmetrical organization of parts of
the body in order to achieve a new, dynamic balance. Following
Lomazzo's reference to Polykleitos, the Doryphoros may be taken
as an example of such a figure.
Conirapposto achieved its modern analytical usage well after
the Renaissance, and at the end of the seventeenth century it still
had a very general meaning, unconnected with figural composition
or classicizing styles.l- Both figure serpentinate and what we now
call classical cantrapposto would have been regarded as
contrapposti. Such equivalence suggests a close relationship of the
two forms, and in fact the figura serpentinata of the High and Late
Renaissance develops out of the revived form of this classical
contrapposto, paralleling (but not repeating) a development which
seems also to have taken place in classical sculpture itself. When
 279

the Florentine artists of the early Quattrocento reclaimed classical

contrapposto and made it a cornerstone of their own style, they
turned for the most part to the simple contrapposto exemplified by
the Doryphoros: Donatello's bronze David (Fig. 2) adheres closely
to the simple classical model. At the same time it represents the
solid beginnings of a development that was finally to produce the
figura serpen tina ta. The tendency-always within the format of
counterposition-is steadily toward greater activity in three
dimensions. If we compare Donatello's David to Leonardo's Leda
(Fig. 3) the difference is clear. Donatello maintains the strength of
the frontal plane by the location of David's shoulders along it.
Leonardo set the shoulders of the Leda along a recessive diagonal,
initiating in this way a more complex contrapposto, one which no
longer simply balances weights in a plane but resolves a system of
directions in which no single direction is dominant. Thus, although
it is evident that the two types of figures are related to one
another, the Leda is based upon radically different formal
principles. It will be useful in the discussion that follows to
maintain this difference. The David represents classical
contrapposto, the Leda is an important example of a new
Renaissance contrapposto, the figura serpentinata.
Contrapposto, or antithesis, was recommended as a general aid
to compositional invention by Renaissance theorists from Alberti
onwards. Leonardo, for example, wrote that "in narrative
paintings one ought to mingle direct contraries (i retti contrari) so
that they may afford a great contrast to one another, and all the
more when they are in close proximity that is, the ugly next to the
beautiful, the big to the small, the old to the young, the strong to
the weak all should be varied as much as possible and close
together."16 The uarieta Leonardo is describing is not simple
abundance of things, but a positive construction of such
abundance something similar to Alberti's distinction between

_s~
 280

copiousness, which is desirable but not good in excess, and true

uarieta is intended.J7 When Paolo Pino treated the topic of
invention, he stated that paintings should be ornamented with
"figures, animals, landscapes and perspectives" but he also
added that there should be "old, young, infants, women, nude,
clothed, standing, lying down, sitting, some in violent action, some
in pain, some who rejoice, some who work, others who rest, alive
and dead."IB These last are all coupled by antithesis and are
contrapposti. Lodovico Dolce agreed with all other Renaissance
theoretical writers in specifying the need for tarieta, but he struck
a more censorious note on the particular subject of contrapposti,
which he regarded as an excessive kind of variety: "There are
some who, having painted a youth, make next to him an old man
or a child, and so, next to a girl, an old woman and similarly,
having made a face in profile they make another full face or three-
quarters. "19Later still, Comanini gathers all the strands of the
debate together, adding the words of Tasso to complete his
thoughts on the matter: "As the poet plays with antitheses, or
with contrapposti, so within a single painting the painter
counterposes the figures of men and women, of infants to the old,
the sea to the land, valleys to mountains, and other similar
contrapositions are made, from which arises more than a little
charm in painting."20 At the same time an excess of contrapposti
"diminishes the greatness and majesty of a poem," and "the
painter who always, when he has painted the image of an infant,
will place next to him an old man or next to a man, a woman or
next to a giant, a dwarf or next to a beautiful girl, an ugly old
crone ...will make an indecent and affected thing."21The dilemma
posed by the charms of contrapposti on the one hand and their
dangers on the other is to be solved by giudizio and sprezzatura.
The painter, according to Comanini, must be clever in the variation
 281

of his figures and "contrive to display in his works a noble

negligence, rather than a base diligence."22
When Leonardo discussed varietil in general, he wrote, "The
painter takes pleasure in the abundance and variety of the
elements of narrative paintings, and avoids the repetition of any
part that occurs in it, so that novelty and abundance may attract
and delight the eye of the observer."23 With this in mind we may
now turn to Leonardo's theories of figural movement.
Leonardo's passionate attention to the description of process
and change of all kinds is legendary. And while his observations,
jottings and sketches of things and figures in movement are done
with the unsystematic precision of the true empiricist, what he
wrote on human movement returns again and again to a central
idea, that of equilibrium and disequilibrium. "Movement is created
by the destruction of balance, that is, of equality of weight, for
nothing can move by itself which does not leave its state of
balance and that thing moves most rapidly which is farthest from
its balance."24 Since in any human posture the arrangement of the
parts of the body could be reduced to either a stable or an
unstable balance, Leonardo's analytic formula applied equally to
figures at rest and in motion, and he used similar terms to describe
both cases. "The figure that sustains itself motionless on its feet
will automatically place equal weight on opposite sides about its
center of gravity. I say that if the motionless figure is posed on its
feet, and an arm is thrust in front of the chest, it will thrust as
much natural weight backward as it thrusts the natural and
accidental weight forward. And I say the same of each part that
projects beyond the whole more than is usual."25 No matter what
a man does, then, in movement or at rest, while he lives he is
incessantly in motion-a figure at rest is as much a resolution of
weights as a figure in action-and this motion necessarily assumes
the pattern of counterposition. The formula for the investigation
 282

and representation of movement thus involves an important

instrument of varieta-contrapposto-and we may begin to
understand the ease with which Leonardo connected the two
ideas.
It seems probable that Leonardo did not distinguish between
his aesthetic criteria and the hypothesis he brought to his thinking
about human movement. In any case, his remarks on movement
often assume the form of compositional prescription. "Figures at
rest ought always to vary their members, that is, if one arm goes
forward the other ought to remain still, or go back and if the figure
stands upon one leg, the shoulder above one leg ought to be lower
than the other, and this is observed by men of good sense, who
always follow nature and balance a man on his feet." This
passage closely parallels the previous one, but now esthetic tarieta
as well as nature is invoked: instead of saying that a figure does
balance its limbs, Leonardo says that it must vary them, and we
have passed from the empirical and descriptive to the aesthetic
and the normative.w
Other parts of Leonardo's discussion of movement make more
explicit its connection with what might be called ornate pictorial
diction-with compositional uarieta generally and more
particularly with contrapposto as one aspect of this.
Never make heads straight on the shoulders, but tum them to the
right side or to the left, even though they look down, or upward,
or straight ahead, because it is necessary for them to look lively
and awake and not asleep. And do not depict the front or the
rear half of the whole person so that too much straightness is
displayed, one half above or below the other half and if you
should wish to use stiff figures, do so only in portraying old
people. Also do not repeat the movements of the arms and legs in
the same figure nor in the bystanders and those near at hand,
unless the needs of the situation that is represented require it.

In these precepts of painting an inquiry is made as to the best

way of persuading of the nature of movement, as the orators
persuade by words, which must never be repeated except in
exclamations but in painting such a thing does not happen,
because exclamations are made in different moments, and
replications of acts are seen in the same time.
 283

... Again, do not repeat the same movements in the parts of the
~odyof a figure which you represent as alone. That is, if the
figure appears to be running alone, do not paint both hands in
front, but one forward and the other behind, because otherwise
the figure could not he running, and if the right foot is forward,
the right arm should be back and the left one forward, because
unless the figure is so disposed, it cannot run well. If you depict
one who is seated, he should have one leg thrust somewhat
forward and show the other in line with the head, and the arm
above should change in position and go forward ... 27

It is interesting that Leonardo specifically cites the example of

rhetoric in the middle of the passage, and I believe that he invokes
Quintilian's famous description of Myron's Discobolos at the
beginning. In this description Quintilian speaks of departure from
the straight line, exemplified by rigid, frontal and symmetrical
archaic sculpture, as the means by which movement is created in
both rhetoric and sculpture. "The body when held bolt upright has
but little grace, for the face looks straight forward, the arms hang
by the side, the feet are joined and the whole figure is stiff from
top to toe. But that curve, I might almost call it motion, with which
we are so familiar, gives an impression of action and animation (Flexus
ille et, ut sic dixerim, motus dat actum quendam et adfectum) ... A
simrlar iInpression of grace and charm is produced by rhetorical
figures ... for they involve a certain departure from the straight line
and have the merit of variation from ordinary usage." Quintilian's
"departure from the straight line" meant departure from ordinary
usage, that is, ornate diction28 and as Renaissance writers were
well aware, one of the principal devices of ornate diction was the
antithesis, or contrapposto. So in a letter to Bernardo Tasso on epic
poetry, defending the premise, among others, that ornament in
poetry instructed by means of delight, G. B. Giraldi Cinzio cites
two lines of a poem by his master Celio Calcagnini on the
Discobolos: "Sunt quaedam formosa adeo, deformia si sint: Et tunc
cum multum displicuere placent:" certain things are beautiful
 284

precisely because they are deformed and so, being very

unpleasant, they please.t?
Quintilian's equation of contortion in sculpture and ornate
diction was well-known to the Renaissance and had a practical
critical importance that gives it a unique place in the history of the
adaptation of ancient norms to modern purposes. Baxandall has
argued that it is related closely to Alberti's centrally important
formulation of variettl.30 Michelangelo probably meant to refer to
this critical commonplace when he described Albrecht Durer's
figures in the Four Books on Human Proportion as "stiff as stakes"
and further condemned the work as being unconcerned with the
all-important question of movcment.U It is not possible to
understand Vasari's characterization of the sculpture of Donatello
and Verrocchio as "upright, straight and symmetrical" without
being aware of his reliance upon Quintilian's schema32 and in fact
it provided the foundation for his account of the breakthrough
that took place when, in the person of Leonardo, Italian art rose
from the seconda maniera of the Quattrocento (compared to the
archaic style, after Quintilian) to the terza maniera .33 Vasari meant
to say-and does say specifically-that the Quattrocento
established ordinary usage, the straight line. It was the historical
role of the artist of the terza maniera, not to overthrow this usage,
but to elaborate and perfect it. When Vasari praises the best
classical sculpture, the good influence of which was essential to
the winning of the true modern style, "nella lor dolcezza e nelle
loro asprezzi.. .con certi alli che non in tutto si storcono, rna si
vanno in certe parli movendo, e si mostrano con una graziosissima
grazia," he opens with a verbal contrapposto not simply to
embellish his prose, but to convey to his readers in fairly precise
terms both the positive qualities that he sees in classical sculpture
and, at the same time, the critical standards by which classical
sculpture itself was judged to be excellent.H
 285

For Leonardo, then, contrapposto was at once the structure of

movement and a fundamental article of figural and compositional
invention. This coincidence was a decisive one, which, in an
essential respect, sealed the fate of a major current of Cinquecento
art. It was the normative and not the descriptive aspects of the
formulation which were to be elaborated by later artists, long after
the formula had survived and surpassed Leonardo's personal
influence. As the formula passed through many repetitions it
underwent a kind of stylistic change all its own, finally becoming
Paolo Pino's infamous "figura tutta sforciata, misteriosa e
difficile."3s The original figura serpentinata was closer to
Lomazzo's definition, and was most various, rather than simply
complex, within the confines of a fairly strict definition. Its
ancestry began, as Birch-Hirschfeld argued, just as did the theory
of movement to which it was so integrally related, with
Leonardo.36
As Shearman has said, contrapposto was one of the great
reconquests of classical art by Renaissance artists.V Its canonical
status among postures is evident from its high incidence and from
the concentrated care with which it was developed and refined in
repetition or slight modification it became one of the most
frequently used devices in Quattrocento painting and sculpture.
We may appreciate the refinement which the classical contrapposto
formula had undergone by the late Quattrocento, and the degree
to which it was relied upon in the construction of figures, if we
consider such a painting as Perugino's Sistine Chapel Presentation
of the Keys, painted in the early 1480s.
At almost the same time Leonardo da Vinci began a critical
reconsideration of the contrapposto formula that was to occupy
him for many years and was to have important consequences for
the High Renaissance style, whose components were then
beginning to form. Perhaps the clearest results of his reflections are
 286

the Leda compositions from the years about the beginning of the
Cinquecento. In its most influential version (Fig. 3), the Leda seems
only a slight modification of the classical formula: Leonardo has
simply brought the arm across the torso but, as we have seen, the
spatial differences between this and the classical model are
fundamental, and Leonardo's delightful new invention quickly
took a favored place next to the older form in the growing
vocabulary of the new style.
Birch-Hirschfeld argued that the Leda was the final precipitate
of artistic thoughts and solutions that considerably predated
Leonardo's concern with the Leda theme itself: he saw the Virgin
in the Uffizi Adoration of the Magi, of 1481, as the lineal ancestor
of the Leda and as the formative figura serpentinata.e It is true that
in terms of basic contrapposto construction the two figures are the
same, even though one is seated and the other is standing and that
the posture of the Virgin in the Adoration of tile Magi was
especially interesting to Leonardo is suggested by his virtual
retracing of the same figure about twenty years later in the
Burlington House cartoon (Fig. 1), done in the years when he was
occupied also with the Leda. In the second appearance of the
seated Virgin, the three-dimensional potential of the new variation
of contrapposto is more fully developed, through the highly wrought
modeling and the much more continuous relationship of mingly
sculptural forms. As for the composition of the Leda it If, thi
seems to have been in its final form by or shortly after 1504, inee
it was copied by Raphael, who came to Florence in that year.3
The basic formula underlying the Madonna i repeated and
clarified in the Leda studies. The knee is brou ht forward on on
side in contrast to the motion of the arm that cro the ch t,
and a constant torsion animates the body the flow of form i
utterly controlled and continuous in two and thr e dirnen ion.
This invention, which will subsequently be called the Leda figure,
 287

corresponds generally to Lomazzo's definition of the figura

serpeniinata, of which it was in fact one of the paradigmatic forms.
Leonardo perfected the Leda figure over many years, with
great love and diligence, as his contemporaries might have said,
and its gestation in such iconographically different matrices as
Leda and the Swan and the Adoration of the Magi argues, as we
noted, that the Leda figure had a value in itself, beyond its being
turned to use in any particular theme. But if there may well have
been a level on which Leda and the Virgin coalesced in Leonardo's
imagination and demanded similar forms, this was not the case
for artists who took up the figural theme after him. For them the
Leda figure had the canonical status of its parent, classical
contrapposto it was clearly an ideal figure for later artists, one
whose significance lay in its gracefulness, its complete aesthetic
resolution and self-containedness. The stylistic force of the
invention is evident in its progression through many repetitions
without important change. It could become the Christ Child in
Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna (Fig. 2), the so-called Parmenides
in Raphael's School of Athens, Galatea in his Farnesina fresco, St.
John in Andrea del Sarto's Madonna of the Harpies, St.
Bartholomew in Fra Bartolornmeo's Pala Pitti (here turned through
ninety degrees), Pontorrno's Virgin in the San Rufillo Altarpiece,
Dosso Dossi's Circe, Salviati's St. Andrew, and St. Bartholomew in
S. Giovanni Decollate, Apollo-David or the Risen Christ in the
hands of the later Michelangelo, and Apollo or Astronomy or Venus
in the hands of Giovanni Bologna. The Leda figure became, in
short, one of the normative inventions of the terza maniera, a kind
of stylistic signature to some of the most representative works of
Cinquecento painting and sculpture.
The Leda figure was a singularly successful fusion of the
theoretical, half-empirical contrapposto of human movement and
the practical, aesthetic contrapposto of pictorial composition. But it
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288

did not by any means exhaust the possibilities for such solutions
Leonardo himself suggested other paths to be explored, and the
themes sounded by his contrapposto studies were immediately
developed and taken in new expressive directions by other artists,
Michelangelochiefamong them.
An instinctive sense of continuous form animated
Michelangelo's earliest sculpture. He had mastered the
construction of counterposed movement by the time he carved the
Battle of the Centaurs, about 1491, as is evident in the only whole
figure in the relief, the striding Lapith just to left of center. This
figure seems to stem directly from the splendid constructions of
movement in the BargeIJobattle relief by Michelangelo's teacher
Bertoldo, finished shortly before. And Bertoldo's figures-and
consequently, indirectly, Michelangelo's figure-may in their tum
stand in Leonardo's debt. For while it is difficult to judge the
impact of Leonardo's early works and investigations on Florentine
art during the years of his absence from the city, between 1481
and 1500, a sketch for a St. Sebastian in Hamburg (Fig. 3), dated
1480-1, shows clearly that by the time he left Florence, Leonardo
-beginning once again with the classical contrapposto usual for
figures of St. Sebastian-had altered the formula to the paint
where it agreed in all essential respects with the High Renaissance
formulation of serpentine movement, awaiting only the
magnification and greater clarity of the later figures.40
Michelangelo with his Battle of the Centaurs began resolutely to
explore a similar construction of movement, whether or not
Leonardo's studies were directly responsible; the satyr behind the
Bacchus of 1496--7 is a serpentine figure of about the same degree
of realization as Leonardo's St. Sebastian drawing. In any case, by
the time the two returned to Florence, in 1500 and 1501, they had
both explored problems of movement based upon comparable
premises. The results they achieved were different in character, as
 289

were the two men, their differences culminating in the two great
competing conceptions of human violence, the battles of Anghiari
and Cascina.
Michelangelo's expressive adaptation of the new contrapposto
form first appears in a drawing of the Virgin and Child with St.
Anne, dated around 1501 (Ashmolean Museum, Fig. 4), which has
frequently been connected with Leonardo's contemporaneous
designs for the same theme.U In Michelangelo's drawing the figure
of the Virgin, although she shares her serpentine movement with
that in Leonardo's Burlington House cartoon (Fig. 4), is reversed.
Her arm is not brought across her chest. The pronounced forward
thrust of the knee is retained, there is a countering twist of the
shoulders, and the whole is united by a slow two- and three-
dimensional S-curve. But although the essential scheme of
complete counterposition is maintained, Michelangelo's Madonna
finally takes her spatial movement from more abruptly sculptural
means than does Leonardo's, from the high relief of her opposing
shoulder and knee, each underscored by a large contrasting
shadow. There are other indications that Michelangelo watched
Leonardo closely during the opening years of the new century. A
drawing in the Casa Buonarroti, long identified as a Leda, more
recently as a Ganymede, repeats the same process of critical
reworking, displaying a fascination with the new form of
movement, but drawing it away from the languor and comparative
inwardness of Leonardo's inventions and advancing it instead
toward the expression of force and energy.42
It has often been remarked that Michelangelo's St. Matthew
(Fig. 5), coming as it does immediately after the David, marks an
important change in his sculpture. The [uria, the psychic and
physical movement that has so awed Michelangelo's
contemporaries and modern critics alike, is first pervasively
evident in it, and this has been explained by most writers as
 - -- -, ~-

290

owing to the influence of classical scuJpture43 one might also point

to, the precedent, near at hand and programmatically related, of
Donatello's Abraham and Isaac on the Campanile of Florence
Cathedral: not only is the same opposition utilized of boldly
thrust forward shoulder and knee, with the head strained back
across the direction of the twist of the body, but this construction
is accompanied by a comparable psychological intensity.44 In
terms of movement, however, the 51. Matthew parallels the figure
of the Virgin in Michelangelo's Ashmolean drawing so closely that
the drawing might be said to record the precise transmission of
one of Leonardo's crowning achievements to Michelangelo's
rapidly crystallizing conception of ideal movement at heroic scale.
A confluence of precedents, both ancient and modern, thus
corroborated and substantially contributed to the sudden
florescence of this momentous conception. However different in
expression the works may be, Leonardo's Virgin and Child unth St.
Anne, his Leda, and Michelangelo's 51. Matthew are all linked by
participation in ideal contrapposio movement. They are all figure
serpenlinale.
Michelangelo, then, cast his conception of figural movement
along lines that were probably suggested to him by Leonardo. In
the very reception-one might almost say perception-of
Leonardo's mature essays in conlrapposlo Michelangelo veered
sharply away from Leonardo's Own pictorial solutions, seeking
rapprochement with the art of antiquity and the early
Quattrocento and realizing his own passion for continuous three-
dimensional movement. However strongly personal his
transformation of Leonardo's inventions (and perhaps theories)
may have been, the kernel idea was amplified rather than altered,
but in this way came to occupy a position of central importance
and significance in Michelangelo's painting and sculpture that it
had never had for Leonardo: the form became a kind of armature
 291

for the human figure that was the foundation of Michelangelo's

art. The Ignudi in the Doni Tondo and on the Sistine Ceiling, the
Times of Day in the Medici Chapel-to cite a few almost random
examples-are figure serpentinate. And while Michelangelo used
the Leda figure in his own compositions and repeatedly exploited
the connotation of grazia e maniera of the figura serpentinata, he
added energy-furia-to the range of meanings the form might
command and made artificial movement into ideal movement. It is
precisely in this way that Lomazzo presents the figura
serpentinata: it is clearly normative, with a significance of its own
prior to its appearance in any recognizable gesture or action. It
unifies and enhances the parts of the body in any movement
whatever: lying, fighting, standing still or kneeling, Lomazzo
wrote, a truly graceful figure will have this serpentine form.4s
Lodovico Dolce understood the nature and intention of
Michelangelo's inventions perfectly well when he wrote that
"movement astonishes him who sees it, seeing in stone, or on
canvas, or in wood an inanimate thing that seems to move."
Marvelous though such an illusion may be, Dolce condemns
excess, continuing with a criticism unmistakably aimed at
Michelangelo: "...these movements should not be continuous and
present in all the figures because men do not always move nor so
fiercely that they seem in desperation."46 The contradiction
between natural iarieta and artificial oarieia emerges clearly in this
criticism Michelangelo is ranged on the side of the artificial.
Corrdivi, praising the Last Judgment in much the terms Dolce had
used to condemn it, wrote that in his great fresco Michelangelo
"expresses all that art is able of the human body, omitting no act
or gesture."47 Dolce refused to admit the absolute fusion of the
artificial and the ideal that Michelangelo's composition implied.
He could not concede him his oarieta without granting him the
plane upon which his whole art was consistent and valid.
 292

Michelangelo's figures all moved, and all moved in similar ways,

because, in the transcendental landscape in which his vision was
cast, they were all alive. Michelangelo's figures surpass natural
movement, touching the limit of perfection of the ideal form of
movement, achieved by art. Their posture has a kind of
emblematic value it means that they live and move in perfect
grace. Thus the tradition that began with Leonardo's definition, at
once hypothetical and tragic, that uprightness was an equilibrium
of opposing movements, that life was a struggle against gravity, is
negated. For Michelangelo life no longer necessitates movement,
but movement signifies life ideal movement is identical with
eternal essence, the forms of time thus defeating time.
If the figura serpentinata was essential to Michelangelo's art
from about 1505 onwards, and if his artistic practice is-as I
believe it clearly to be-e-consistent with Lomazzo's presentation of
the idea, then we may entertain Lomazzo's ascription of the idea
to Michelangelo more seriously. It will be remembered that
Michelangelo was supposed to have given the doctrine of the
serpentine figure to his disciple, Marco da Siena. This is Marco
Pino, who came to Rome in the late 1540s. He was, consequently,
in Rome during precisely the years when Michelangelo was most
concerned with writing a treatise on human anatomy and
movement. Marco Pino's own theoretical bent is indicated by his
authorship of a treatise on architecture, which was known to
Lomazzo.sf Thus, even though nothing more than circumstantial
evidence links Lomazzo, Marco Pino and Michelangelo,
Lomazzo's account of the derivation of the figura serpentinata is
not inconsistent with what little evidence there is, and Marco Pino
may well have provided a bridge across the thirty-five years
separating Lomazzo's Trattato from the period of Michelangelo's
concern with art theory in the years around 1550.
 293

If the doctrine of the figura serpentinata can be fairly securely

linked with Michelangelo, when did he first formulate it? This is a
more difficult question, and probably will never be simply
answered. At several times in his life Michelangelo pursued the
theme of continuous movement through three-dimensional form to
degrees of abstraction suggesting theoretical awareness. The
Laocoon, unearthed in 1506, could have suggested the name, as
well as underwritten the formula, and the Sistine Ceiling Jonah or
Moses and the Brazen Serpent pendentives of 1512 (Fig. 6) seem to
be conscious thematic developments of such movement. Again in
the late 1520s and early 1530s,when he most deeply explored the
spiritualizing visual energies of the figura serpentinata,
Michelangelo also allowed inanimate line, contours and folds of
drapery to run in utterly artificial patterns, recalling the
autonomous linear movement of Quattrocento drawing. It was
during these years that he carved the Victory, (Fig. 7). This most
serpentine sculpture is comparable in linear abstraction to the
contemporary Resurrection drawings (Fig.8), and the intense purity
and apparently conscious development of the theme once again
suggest a concern with the formula in itself. Whenever the figura
serpentinata got its name, it is most important to realize that in its
essential form it existed as a conscious figural construction at
least from the beginning of the definition of the High Renaissance
style.
As we have seen, the Quattrocento set the stage for the
invention of the figura serpentinata with the reconquest of classical
contrapposto. It also provided a notion of grace and beauty of
movement which, both in theory and practice, was the
unmistakable prelude to the kinds of significance embodied by the
High Renaissance forms. About 1435 Leon Battista Alberti,
describing the graceful movement of inanimate things, wrote that
"movements are especially pleasing in hair where part of it spirals
 294

as if wishing to knot itself, waves in the air like flames, twines

around itself like a serpent, while part rises here, part there. "49
Alberti's sense of linear grace reflected a widespread taste amply
illustrated in Quattrocento painting and sculpture, in a tradition
to which Leonardo's studies for the head of the Leda still belong.
This definition of grace did not stop at inanimate things, and
Alberti's discussion of how one makes a body appear alive
anticipates Lornazzo's formulation of the figura serpentinata: "The
members of the dead ought to be dead even to the fingernails, and
the living ought to be alive in every part. A body is said to be alive
when of its own accord it has certain movements. It is called dead
when the members may no longer carry out the functions of life,
that is, movement and sentiment. Then the painter who wishes to
express life in things will make every part in movement. But of all
the movements that are charming and graceful, those movements
are most graceful and most lively which move upwards toward
the air."so With the last sentence the terms used to describe
graceful figural movement are the same as those more vivid terms
used to describe inanimate movement. Lomazzo (or his source)
paraphrased Alberti fairly exactly, fusing the two passages we
have just cited, developing certain parts and elaborating-
probably Platonically-the image of a flame of fire.SI
Alberti is most explicit in equating life and movement. A liVing
figure is one that has the potential for movement, much as a soul
was first of all a principle of movement, revealed by movement
itself but prior to it.S2 The implications of Alberti's remarks are
that a figure made by art can be said to be alive if it appears to
move or has the form of movement-more was involved than the
photographic recording of a moment's action. But Alberti spoke of
movement in linear, two-dimensional terms, and the verb
serpenieggiare seems to have first been applied to the activity of
contours. Leonardo, writing "of pictures in outline:' advised that
 295

"the contours of any object should be considered with the most

careful attention, observing how they twist like a serpent (il modo
de lor serpeggiare)." He also transferred this language into three
dimensions, connecting it specifically with cantrapposto movement:
"Of the twisting (serpeggiare) and balance (bilico) of figures and
other animals. Whatever figure you make, remember to avoid
woodenness, [remember that they should] be counterposed or
balanced (cioe ch'elle vadina contrapesando ossia bilanciando) in such
way that they do not seem like sticks."53Lomazzo was familiar
with both the two- and three-dimensional connotations of
serpentine movement, but for the most part he is concerned with
something discussable only in three dimensions, the continuous
torsion of a body. Nevertheless, the figura serpentinata maintained
the association with line, consequently with disegno, tha t
prescriptions for graceful movement first had in Alberti. Perhaps
this was what Giulio Camillo Delrninio meant when he wrote that
it was in the depiction of movement that a painter would be most
able to display "10 stile suO."54At any rate, the serpentine
movement of line is perfectly consistent with the [igur a
serpentinata, which carried the connotations of maniera, grazia and
disegno of its graphic counterpart into three dimensions.
Michelangelo's Resurrection drawings (Fig. 11) are, once again,
perhaps the profoundest essays in the spiritualizing energy of
grazia e maniera, defined in the movement of both two-dimensional
serpentine line and three-dimensional serpentine form. In them the
distinction between the artificial and the spiritual dissolves, and
maniera and grace become one.
The figura serpentinata was a mode of embellished pictorial
diction, a literal contrapposto, which developed in intimate
connection with a widespread theory of movement first expressed
by Leonardo. Michelangelo seized the general, normative
connotations of the device and made it the basis for a conception
 296

of ideal movement. The currency of the formula that arose from

the activity of these two originators coincides more or less
precisely with the currency of the central Italian Late Renaissance
style. But if the figura serpentinata and its more specific variant,
the Leda figure, arose from a conception of movement as
contrapposto, the idea of contrapposto was a more general one,
which, I would like to suggest, was essential to the La te
Renaissance style, and as the critical disiderata which governed
the development of the style became more and more evident in
painting, was essential to the maniera. The preeminent example of
a contrapposto surviving from Renaissance pictorial and theoretical
usage is chiaroscuro. If chiaroscuro, like the figura serpentinata, is a
contrapposto, then such paintings as Leonardo's St. John the Baptist
(Fig. 9) or the Bindo Altoviti in Washington are pure examples of
embellished diction, their counterposed figural compositions
exactly paralleled by their chiaroscuro.55
Since counterposition of the parts of the body was first of all a
formula for the movement of figures, and since this formula had
an empirical basis, it is sometimes difficult to tell where the
depiction of natural movement leaves off and artificial grace
begins. Usually the simple conspicuousness of the figure--that
kind of conspicuousness which characterized secondary but
compositionally important figures, from the servants in
Brunelleschi's competition relief onwards-is the best guide: it is in
the nature of embellished c1ictionthat the embellishment be visible.
Allfigure serpentinate are either isolated, placed in the foreground,
or compositionally critical. The balanced figures of Horace and
Sappho in Raphael's Parnassus are both figure serpentinate, and
Raphael used similar figures in the foreground of the
Transfiguration. In both cases these figures are as prominent as
their gestures are paradoxical. They should be seen a
compositional embellishments-by definition, then, as displays of
 297

skill-but also as embodiments of grace understood as ideal

movement. The mad boy in the Transfiguration, himself a figural
conirapposio, is perhaps counterposed on another level of meaning
to these intentionally graceful figures, recalling Leonardo's
antithesis of the beautiful and the ugly, and may afford an
example of the breadth of the contrapposto formula.56 Or he may
simply be a portrayal of violent motion, recalling Leonardo's
dictum that such motion departs most from balance. On the other
hand Titian, to take a dissimilar example, invoked the conscious
artificiality of the figura serpentinata only occasionally-as a rule
his figures, although they move with grace and measure, are not
conspicuously serpentine. The figures in his destroyed Marl1)rdom
of St. Peter Martyr or in the various versions of Venus and Adonis
are, I would argue, consciously serpentine. It may be that Titian-
and other artists a5 well-did not use such a construction of
movement by chance, but rather drew upon its clear connotations
of artificiality as themes-or patrons-demanded.
Lomazzo wrote that the figura serpentinata was used by the
ancients, and if we accept his definition there were indeed many
classical precedents for it. The Apollo Belvedere, to mention one of
the sculptures most important for the Cinquecento style, is mildly
serpentinate. The Menelaus and Patroclus, which Michelangelo knew
in the truncated but influential form of the Pasquino, is
serpentine.57 Finally, and most important of all, the great image of
the Laocoon, which appeared at such a critical moment in the
formation of the terza muniera, must have added all the weight of
Pliny's authority to the nascent doctrine. Thus classical sculpture
was important for the invention of the serpentine figure, but we
should stress that its definition was finally made up of many
ingredients and that, to repeat an earlier remark, we are dealing as
much with the standards by which classical sculpture was praised
as with the results of its influence.
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298

As might be said of the Late Renaissance style generally, the

figura serpentinata was born in Florence and matured and
flourished in Rome, principally in the art of Raphael and
Michelangelo. By 1525 it had spread from its new center of
concentrated development and elaboration to other parts of Italy,
becoming, as Shearman has written, an essential element of the
maniera. As a true element of a style, it was not the property of
anyone artist and since its definition could embrace all kinds of
movement it was a more generous formula than the classical
contrapposto from which it sprang. So it allowed a great range of
expressive uses in the hands of artists as different as Pontormo
and Veronese. Figure serpen tina te could embellish a rational world,
as they did Raphael's School of Athens, or generate worlds out of
their own peculiar energy and significance, as they did in
Michelangelo's Last Judgment. They could be superhuman and
violent, as they were in Tintoretto, or mild and neoclassical, as
they were in the sculpture of another Venetian, Alessandro
Vittoria (see again Fig. 1). Raphael's St. Michael (Fig. 10), the
executioners and Christ in Michelangelo's Flagellation (Fig. 12),his
Victory (Fig. 10), both Louvre Slaves, the Christ Child and the 51.
John the Baptist in Parmagianino's Vision of St. Jerome, Gabriel and
the Virgin in Pontormo's Annunciation, Jean Goujon's nymphs from
the Fontaine des Innocents, the angels in Beccafumi's St. Michael,
Sansovino's Bacchus, Bronzino's Borghese St. John the Baptist,
many figures by Francesco Salviati, all the figures on Ammanati's
Fountain of Neptune, Giovanni Bologna's Mercury are figure
serpentinate. But since the formula went wherever the maniera went,
any selection of examples will necessarily be arbitrary. The ftgura
serpentinata remained the object of the intense concern of
Parmigianino, Beccafumi, Rosso, Perino del Vaga, Pontormo and
Michelangelo. Michelangelo, to whom Lomazzo attributed its
invention, never wavered in his devotion to the grace,

I
 299

indistinguishably artificial and ideal, for which the serpentine

figure stood. At the same time, its very universality made it seem
the hallmark of the terza maniera, which it in fact was. As decades
passed the figura serpentinata went more and more the way of
stylistic forms, growing increasingly elaborate, having less to do
with the improvement of nature by art than with art itself. By
mid-century the earlier examples of the formula had become
paradigmatic, the formula itself perfunctory or academic and, in
the hands of painters like Giorgio Vasari or Pellegrino Tibaldi, or
sculptors like Vincenzo de'Rossi, notoriousSS
Like classical contrapposto, the figura serpentinata passed into
the general neoclassical tradition and the significance it had had
for Michelangelo and the artists of the Cinquecento was mostly
forgotten. Bernini, folJowing the last great and fuIJflowering of the
form in the sculpture of Giovanni Bologna, used the formula
repeatedly in his early works. Some of these sculptures are
referable to Michelangelo's sculpture and some to the classical
sculpture that nourished the original Cinquecento conception, but
its use in the Aeneas and Anchises, the David, the Neptune and
Triton, the Rape of Proserpina and the Daphne and Apollo suggests a
practical awareness of the formula. In Bernini's hands-as in the
hands of Seicento artists generally-the formula became to an
even greater extent a device for the controlled investigation and
convincing construction of movement. Bernini soon abandoned the
figura serpentinata in favor of more pictorial means. Late in his life,
however, in the Angel with the Superscription for the Ponte
San!' Angelo, the figura serpentinata appears once again, much as it
did in Michelangelo's Resurrection drawings, and the forms of
nature and antiquity are once again shot through with the
animating and perfecting forms of complete cantrappasto,
artificiality and grace, and with the highest significance of the
figura serpentinata.
 300

1W. Hogarth, TIle Allalysis of Beauty, London, 1753. v-vi, 38.

2Ibid., 38-39.
3E. Panofsky, "The Neaplatonic Movement and Michelangelo," in Studies in
Icollology, New York, 1962, 174-178.
4]. Shearman, Mannerism, Baltimore, 1967, 81-91. The debt of this paper to
Shearman's reorientation of the question of Mannerism will become increasingly
apparent to the reader and should be acknowledge at the outset.
SK. Birch-Hirschfeld, Die Lehre von der Malere; in Cinquecenta, Rome, 1912, 36-
43.
6C. P. Lornazzo, Trattato dell'Arte de In Pittura, Milan, ]584, 22.
7Ibid., 22-24.
8Birch-Hirschfeld (lehre, 36) gives a list of Cinquecento authors by whom either
the movement of muscles or of parts of the body are described in terms of
contraposition. In addition to several such passages in Leonardo (see notes 24-
26 below) he cites R. Borghini, 11Riposo, Florence, 1584, 152, Lomazzo, and G.B.
Armenini, De'Veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna. 1587), Plsa, 1823, 87-88. To
this list the important addition should be made of Pomponius Cauricus, De
5culptura (Florence, 1504), ed. and trans. A. Chastel and R. Klein, Paris, 1969,
194-195; and the less significant G. C. Delminio, Della lmitazione (Venice, 1544),
in Trattati di Poetica e Retorica deI'SOO, ed. B. Weinburg, Bart, 1970, 180-181.
This much abbreviated theory of movement may reflect contact with Leonardo's
manuscripts at Fontainebleau, Weinberg dates the composition of the Della
lmitazione about 1530.
9The association of the pyramid with a flame probably derives directly Or
indirectly from Plato's Timaeus, 55-56. The pyramid is described as the most
mobile form, associated with the most mobile element, fire. "Thus in accordance
with the right account and the probable, that solid which has taken the form of a
pyramid shall be the element and seed of fire:" Plato, Timaeus, London-Now York,
1961, 136--137. Many: writers have ~~ted th~ sUitabil.ity of th~ pyram.id formula
to the demand that a figural composItion be clrcumscnbabJe Within a Simple solid
geometrical form. However, this may be, Plato's association of the form with
movement is consistent with Lomazzo's Own immediate COncern. The third part of
the formula, that figures should be multiplied by one, t~o, and three, is more
difficult. Lomazzo (Tranato, 23-24), cI arly understood this to mean the basis for
a system of proportions, and he was followed by Birch-Hirschfeld {Lehre, 36),
who saw it as a simple harmonic system in which parts stood in ratios of 1:1,2;1,
3;1, 3;2, Shearman (Ma"1/ensm, 86) und rstands the phrase to mean that
serpentine composi~ions should,be made ~~ of one, two or three fi.gur ,Su0 a
reading is har~ to discount despite Lomazzo s more contempor,JrY mte!"pretatlon ..
since serpentine figures, as, w~ shall see, .Iend ~hemselv~s to IIlterJaced
multiplication, Michelangelo s VIctory and Clo.v~nm Bologna s Samson ami tJ~
Philistine are two examples of mnny such compositions.
lOLomazzo, Tranato. 293.
llLomazzo's remarks on movement are often referred to Leonardo; see for
example Birch-Hirschfeld, Lehre, 37-38; E. Battisti, "La critica di Michelangelo
dopo il Vasari," Ii RillQsci11lellto,YIl, 1956, lS~l56 .. Lomazzo knew Leonarao's
manuscripts and may have even patched ti,em IOto hISchllpter On movement The
argument presented here (see also note 8 above) seems sufficient to show that
 301

Leonardo's basic theory of movement as contra position was fairly well diffused
by the late Cinquecento, and it is not necessary to suppose that Lomazzo must
have had it from the original source. The fact that Lomazzo did know Leonardo's
manuscripts makes it all the more significant that he repeatedly and explicitly
attributes the jigura serpentinata to Michelangelo. See also note 48 below. The
dep~ndence of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura as we know it in the Codex
Urbmas upon Alberti's De Pictura is noted by L. Heydenreich in his introduction
to Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed. A. P. McMahon, Princeton, 1956, I,
xxv-xxvi; and Alberti's formulation of bodily movement (Della Pittura, ed. L.
Malle, Florence, 1950, 96: "veggiamo che chi sui braccio disteso sostiene uno
peso, fermando il pie quasi come ago di bilancia, tutta l'altra parte del corpo si
contra ponga a contra pesare il peso") may well have provided the kernel of
Leonardo's hypothesis. The dependence of certain parts of Lomazzo's chapter on
movement upon Alberti, as noted by E. Holt, A Documelltary History of Art,
Garden City, 1958, II, 80, although literal, may not be immediate.
12Lomazzo, Trattato, 293-296. Such definitions formed a major part of treatments
of movement after Alberti (see Della Pittura, 95-97). Leonardo's connection of
movement with infinity, which found illustration in the Codex Huygens (E.
Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Yinci's Art Theory, London, 1940,
122-128) is an important and original contribution to the Renaissance art-
theoretical discussion of movement, but it is by no means the central part of his
theory of movement. Leonardo understood perfectly well the limitations of
continuity. See his Treatise, 15:" ... These two sciences {geometry and arithmetic]
do not encompass anything but the investigation of continuous and discontinuous
quantity. They are not concerned with quality, the beauty of nature's creations
and the harmony of the world." Leonardo certainly believed that motion was
continuous (Treatise, 360-363) and that any movement could be regarded
quantitatively as having infinite aspects. It was when movement left this
quantitative realm and became qualitatIve-i.e., when it was considered in light of
its defining and differentiating characteristics (see for example Aristotle,
Metaphysics, 1020b: "t Quality' means the differentia of primary being: a man is
an animal of a certain quality (two footed) ... and a circle is a figure of a certain
quality (without angles ... ")-that it entered the realm of decorum, "of the beauty
of nature's creations and the harmony of the world." The late mannerist
conception of "qualitative proportion" is based upon precisely this distinction.
See Vincenzo Danti, Trattato delle perfette preporzioni (Florence, 1567) in Trattati
d'Arte del Cinquecento, ed. P. Barocchi, Bart, 1960, I, 234: "la proporzlone
propriamente ... non e altro che un modo di comporee Ie cose in guisa che l'una con
l'altra convenga, e parimente iI tutto di lora insieme con quelle, 10 alcuna misurat~
quantita, 0 vero qualita, od alcun predicamentc, secondo il fine ache la cosa 51
compone." A tfiing was proportionate when part and whole. were in
correspondence to their definitions as well as in their numerical relations. Such
"higher" proportion embraced quantitative proportion. It was on the level of
decorum that Leonardo could insist that motion reflect the states of men's minds
(Treatise, 405-413). Continuity, counterposition and expression were thus
separate and complementary aspects of Leonardo's reflections on the
representation of movement.
1JLomazzo, Trattato. 295--296. E. Holt, A DoclInIeIltary History of Art, II, 81,
offers a different translation of the sentence beginning "The same must be
observed," which slightly, but significantly, alters its sense.
 302

14Shearman, Mannerism, 83-86, has related figure serpentinate to rhetorical

contrapposti and more generally to ornate diction without, however, arguing ~at
the connection is as explicit as It is considered to be here. Quintilian (who defines
antithesis in Institutio oratorio, IX, iii, Be) treats it under the category of figures (IX,
i, 2-3) which, like tropes, "effect alterations in language (a view which has also
led to their being styled. motions [rnotus dicunturJ)." Figures are substitutions of
words which add "force and grace to the matter;" they involve "a departure from
the simple and straiq,htforward method of expression coupled with a certain
rhetorical excellence. In the sense in which a figure is a scheme "it means a
I

rational change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form, that is
to say, a change analogous to that Involved by sitting, lying down on something or
looking back. Consequently when a student tends to continuous or ... excessive
use ot the same cases, tenses, rhythms or even feet, we are in the habit of
instructing him to vary his figures with a view to the avoidance of monotony."
The general meaning of contrapposto as the coupling of opposites is sufficient for
the purpose of this argument and seems to correspond to the usage of Renaissance
art theorists. For the more refined terminology of related terms in rhetoric and
reference to the authors who defined them, see L.A. Sonnino, A Handbook to
Sixteenth-century Rhetoric, London, 1968, s. vv. contentic, cvntropositum,
campa ratio and contrarium, Augustine (De Ciuitate Dei, X, xviii), who called such
figures "the most decent of all elocution," refers to them as antiilteta, opposites and
contraposites.
15F. Baldinucci, for example, in his Vocauulario del Disegno (Opere, 1809,II, 144)
refers his reader from "contrapposro" to "contrapporre," which he defines simply
as "porre contra, opporre."
16Leonardo, Treatise, 271. See also L. B. Alberti, Della Pittura, ed. L. Malle,
Florence, 1950, 101. "Sara ivi gratia quando l'uno colore opresso malta sara dal
altro differente, che se ivi dipignerai Diana guidi il coro, sia ad questa nimpha
panni verdi, ad quella bianchi, ad l'altra rossati, al'altra crocei, et cosi ad
ciascuna divers! colori tale che sempre i chinri siena presso ad altri obscuri. Sara
questa comparatione ivi Ia bellezza de colori piu chiara et piu leggiadra ... " And
B. Castiglione, II Libra del Cortegiana, Florence, 1947, 14K "1bani pittori ...con
l'ombra fanno apparere e mostrano i lumi de'rilevi: e cost col lume profondano
l'ombre dei piaru, e compagnana i colori divers! insieme di modo, che per quella
diversiea l'uno e l'altro meglio si dimostra, e'l poser delle figure contrario Tuna
all'altra le aiuta a far quell' officio che e intenzion del pittore ... " See also note 56
below.
17See M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in
Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, London, 1971, 1.%-137. The
distinction is between profusion and diversity. The terms and their connotations
are from rhetoric.
18p. Pino, Dialogo di Pittura (Venice, 1548), in Trattati d'Arte, I, 115.
19L. Dolce, Dialogo della Pittura (Venice, 1557), in Trattati d'Arte, I, 179. All
writers were In agreement that counterposition could become a vice, and it was
subject to the final critical authority of decorum. Leonardo (Treatise, 288),after
advising the direct contrast of opposites as a compositional principle, also
specifies (Treatise, 271; the passages arej'uxtaposed by C. Pedretti, Leonardo da
Vinci On Painting. A Lost Book [Libra A , London, 1965, 80) that the painter
should "not mix the limbs of the young with those of the old ... males...with
 303

females ... " Consistently with this B. Daniello, Della Poetica (1536), in Trattali di
~oe~rca,.1, 250, uses contrapposto to illustrate Horatian grotteschi. "Sia dunque,
fighuoli, quella materia che di trattar intendete ... quella istessa sempre dal
cominciamento insino al fine, a non or grave, or vagal or chiara et alta, or umile et
oscura, accio che noi non fingessimo poi un poema somigliante a quella
rnonstruosa e disparate figura che nel principia dell'Arte sua pcetica mirabilmente
ne dipigne Orazio." Horace's words served both to define and to restrain artistic
license. On the significance of the grottesco in Renaissance art theory and
criticism, see my "Michelangelo on Architecture," in the June, 1972 Art Bulletin.
Leonardo himself is perhaps the best known explorer of the anti-Horatian terrain
of such invention, and wrote (Treatise, 277) that "Ie bellezze con le bruttezze
paiono piu r.0tenti l'una per I'altra." This aspect of his art is investigated by E.H.
Gombrich, Leonardo's Grotesque Heads;' Leonardo Saggi e Rieerclte, Rome, 1954,
197-219.
20C. Comanini, II Figillo avera del Fine della Pittura (Mantua, 1591), in Trattati
d 'Arte. ill, 362.
21Ibid., 363-364.
22Ibid., 364. It might be noted that this last phrase is itself a contrapposto.
23Leonardo, Treatise, 268.
24 lbid., 346; see also 337.
25Ibid., 330.
26Ibid., 334. This translation differs somewhat from McMahon's. The
connection of uarieta and inequality is given unambiguous statement by
Michelangelo's late disciple Vincenzo Danti in his Trattato delle per{ette
proporzioni (Trattati d'Arte, I, 234). Danti wrote that "comisuraz.ione," which he
considers to be the essence of proportion, "may be made of things equal and
unequal, although the proportion of unequal things will be more artful and will
occasion greater beauty than will the proportion of equal things. This is so
because they bear in themselves difference or uarieta , more entirely than equal
things are ever able to do. This uarieta is one of the principal reasons why some
compositions are of greater and rarer beauty."
27Leonardo, Treatise, 385-386.
28see note 14 above. Quintilian's description of the Discobolos (Institutio, II, xiii,
9-11) is clearly an illustration of the same points. Quintilian forbids repetition,
but considers it necessary for purposes of amplification and emphasis (lX, ii, 3-5).
29C.B. Ciraldi Cinzio, Lettere a Bernardo Tasso sulla Poesia epica (1557), in
Trattati di Poetiea, Il, 458-459; his reference is to C.B. Pigna, "In statuam
discoboli," Carminum Libri Quattuor, Venice, 1553, 199-200. Giraldi c;inzia's
treatment of contrapposti is more complex th~n any of the oth~r~ consld.ered,
incorporating the idea that men take pleasure In the ug.1Ywh.en It IS beautifully
imitated, ana so adding paradox to cOlltr~pposto. This fu~~?nhad the gran~
precedent of St. Augustine, who i':l th~ City of God (X~XVIlI) make antithesis
(contrapositum) the pnme metaphor I~ hJS t~eo(:hcy,argumg. that Just a~ the poet
embellished the order of his poeI!' With antitheses, ~o God Willed the existence of
ugliness in order that the whole might be more beautiful.
30M. Baxandall, "Bartholomeus Facius on Painting," [ournat of the '(Varlmrg and
Courtauld Institutes, XXVII, 1964, 95; and, by the same author, GlOUO aHd the
Ora lars, 18-19.
 304

31A Condivi, La Vita di Michelangelo raccolta dal suo discepolo, ed. P. d'Ancona,
Milan, 1928, 176.
32C. Vasari, Le Vite de'piis eccellenti pittari scultori ed architettori, ed. G.
Milanesi, Florence, 1906, IV, 8. "... e Ia misura fu universale 51nella architettura
come nella scultura, fare i carpi delle figure retti, dritti, e con Ie membra
organizzati parimente ... "
33See the preceding note.
34Vasari, Vite, IV, 10.
35p. Pirro, Dialogo, 115.
36Birch-Hirschfeld, Lehre, 37.
37Shearman, Mannerism, 83.
38Birch-Hirschfeld, Lehre, 37. A.E. Popham (The Drawings 01
New York, 1945, 14-15) notes the earliest indication 0 Leonardo's later
Leonardo do Vinci,

contrapposto in the studies for the Madonna-uiim the Cat. The Christ child, worked
out separately in several of the surviving sketches, explores exactly the same
formuIa used in the later figures.
39C. J. Hoogewerff ("Leonardo e Raffaello," Com mel/tori, 3, 1952, 173-183)
suggests that Raphael's drawing is later than his generally been thought, relating
it to Leonardo's last thoughts on the Leda theme during and after hIS period in
Rome from 1513 to 1516. It seems certain, however, that the Leda was a recurrent
concern for Leonardo, and there is no real difficulty in dating the invention
earlier. A.E. Popham and 1. Wilde, The Italian Drawings at Windsor Castle. The
Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, London, 1949, no. 789, relate
Raphael's drawing (which they place "certainly" in his Florentine ,period) to a
drawing by Leonardo, noting that Leonardo probably did not do a pamting of the
theme in his years in Florence coinciding with Raphael's.
40A. E. Popham, Drawings of Leoliard 0, 213 B.
41K. T. Parker, Catalogue of the Collection of Dnnoings in the Ashmolean Museum,
London, 1956, 291 recto. The drawing is generally connected with Leonardo's
cartoon on display in the 55. Annunziata when Michelangelo returned to
Florence in 1501. Although the drawing cannot, of course, be directly compared to
the lost cartoon, it seems not too great an assumption that the Burlington House
cartoon is a variant of the same composition.
42p. Barocchi, "Michelangelo e la sua scuola," in I Dieegni di Casa Buonarroti e
d'if,li Uffizi, Florence, 1962, no. 3 recto.
4 A. Grunwald, "Uber einige Werke Michelangelos in ihrem Verhaltnisse zur
Antike," [ahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammunigen ill Wiell, XXVII, 1907-1909,
130-131, convincingly demonstrates the relationship of the St. Matthew to the
Pasquino. See also J. Wilde, "Eine Stu die Michelangelos nach der Antike,"
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistoriscnen lnstituts ill Fioretti, IV, 1932-1934, 41-64.
For a resume of sources and discussions of arguments concerning the date of the St.
Matthew, see 1. Pope-Hennessy, italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture,
London-New York, 1970, 310-311.
44]. Wilde, "Eine 5tudie Michelangelos," stresses the importance of early
Quattrocento sources (Donatello Masaccio, Jacopo della Querela) for
Michelangelo's early formation, seeing the antique as iness~tiill, cor:stituting "nur
eine hochgescharzte fremde Kunstwelr" that from time to time provided him with
 305

figural motiyes. Drawings in the British Museum that are almost universally
con!'ected With the early history of the series of prophets for the Duomo G· Wilde,
!ta!lan Drawings in !he Department of Prints and Drawings in tile British Museum.
MIchelangelo and his Studio, London, 1953, no. 3) and the Dffizi (P. Barocchi,
Michelangelo e la sua scuola, no. 1) are related by Wilde to Donatello's prophets.
It should be noted that both the drawing of a prophet in profile and the small
i~awmg (Barocchi, I recto b) are figure serpeniinate, the latter. pure Led. figure.
See above, note 13.
46Dolce, Dialogo, 180.
47c;~ndivi, Vita, .154;Condivi ends his description of the Last Judgment by
~ralsmg the same kind of variety.
8E. Berea, "Grazia e Furia in Marco Pino," Paragone, 151, July, 1962, 47, n. 11,
cites an eighteenth-century reference to an "Architettura di Marco da Siena pittore
et arc.hitetto, ~.S. in un grande volume 1560," corroborating Lomazzo, Idea del
Tempio della P,ttura, Milan, 1590, 17: "Marco da Siena ... scrisse un grandissimo
volume d'Architettura." It is interesting to note that, if the eighteenth-century
reference can be believed, this "grandissimo volume" would have been written
while Michelangelo was alive.
49Alberti, Della Pittura, 97.
50Ibid., 89-90. A. Warburg, Cesammelte Schrijten, Berlin, 1932, I, 6-22,
discusses the Quattrocento tradition of serpentine linear movement and its
relationship to antique sculpture. A figure such as the woman seen from behind to
the left in Ghiberti's ]saacJ'anel on the Gates of Paradise is a splendid example of
a figura serpentinata, an perhaps a formula for graceful three-dimensional
movement stretches back to the early Quattrocento, to Masaccio's Brancacci
Chapel Eve or to Jacopo della Querela, who, according to Vasari, first gave
movement and grace to marble: Vasari, Vite, IT, 105.
51See note 9 above.
52Cf. for example Aristotle, De Anima, 415b. Birch-Hirschfeld, Lehre, 39-40,
recognized that the kind of movement signified by the figura serpentinata was
"immanent" and not "momentary."
53Leonardo, Treatise, 115. See also .l. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo
da Vinci, London, 1883,I, 591. Lomazzo, Tratiato, 296, concludes his remarks on
movement with the admonition that "one should avoid straight lines and acute
angles; this rule ought to be observed as much as possible, as given by Buonarroti."
It will be remembered that Lomazzo began hiS first discussion of the figura
serpenttnata with a definit~o.n of painting as the embellishment of a two-
dimenslonal plane. See also ibid., 384-385.
54See note 8 above.
55See Leonardo, Treatise, 277: "Concerning white with black and black with
white each seems stronger because of the other, and thus opposites always appear
to int~nsify one another;" or Treatise, 45~: "You !'!1ustplace your ~ark figure
against a light back~round, and 1£ your figure IS light, place It agamst a dark
background, and if it is both light and dark, put the dark side against a light
background and the light side against a dark background." Like the notes on the
figural contrapposto, thes~ st.atements see':I'}O me clearly to hov~r betweenthe
descriptive and the prescriptive. R. Longhi, Compnman Spagnoli della maruera
itahana," Paragone, 43,1953, 8, notes the composition by cOlltrapposto of the
 ---- ·~

306

heads in Berruguete's Borghese Sacra Conoersazione; an even more alient

application of such structural uarieta is evident in Pontormo's Carmignano
Visitation. L. Steinberg, "Picasso: Drawing as if to Possess," Artforum, October,
1971, 44-53, coins the word "serpentinatlon," by which he means to describe
figures the front and back of which are visible simultaneously, using the term as
one of the categories to describe the relationship between object and
viewer/artist in the kinds of images with which he is concerned. Such a figure is
here. Most of the examples he adduces depend-as
br
a contrapposto, but not necessarily a figura serpentinaia, the argument presented
hope to show in a later
study-from the Discobclos, and make up a special class of figure serperuinate,
too restricted to be equal to Lomazzo's much more inclusive formula. Another
example of conspicuous serpentine movement coupled with chiaroscuro is the copy
after Polidoro da Caravaggio, illustrated by Shearman, Mannerism, fig. 27.
56It might also be to the point to consider in this regard Michelangelo's Victory
and the psychomachic groups of which it is representative. No compositional
scheme is more typical of the maniera.
57See note 44 above. If he did not see the relationship between Leonardo and
Michelangelo quite correctly, Hogarth (Analysis of Beauty, v) at least raised the
question; he also apprehended the distinguishing importance of antique sculpture
for Michelangelo's interpretation of serpentine movement when, introducing the
topic of the serpentine line, Hogarth observed, "It is not indeed a little strange, that
the great Leonardo da Vinci (amongst the many philosophical precepts which he
hath at random laid down in his treatise on painting) should not have given the
least hint of anything tending to a system of this kind; especially, as he was
contemporary with Michel Angelo, who is said to have discovered a certain
principle in the trunk only of an antique statue (well known from this
circumstance by the name of Michel Angelo's Torso, or Back), which principles
gave his works a grandeur equal to the best antiques." On the persistent tradition
connecting Michelangelo's art and the Torso Belvedere see G. vasan, 1.A Vila di
Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. P. Barocchi, Milan, 1962,IV,
2101.
58pellegrino Tibaldl's Adoration of tile Shepherds in the Borghese is an especially
doctrinaire application of universal serpentine movement. Nearly all of Vincenzo
de'Rossl's brutal Labors of Hercules in the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo
Vecchio in Florence are academically routine figure serpentinote, and his Bargello
Dying Adonis shows us the serpentine act of expiration.
 307
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 313

Fig. 13 Raphael, St. Michael, 1517. Paris, Musee du Louvre

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Fig. 14 Michelangelo, Study for a Flagellation, c. 1530. London,

British Museum