Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism:

Deleuze and the Essence of Art

Sjoerd van Tuinen

Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philo-
sophical concepts for styles from art history: Expressionism and the
Baroque. It is true that he discusses many other notions from the history
of style, but these are the only ones that are truly made to “exist in them-
selves.” Or might there be a third, buried like a wedge between its two
neighboring concepts? Although the notion of Mannerism recurs in several
of Deleuze’s writings, it is never developed in a systematic way. Even in
The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Mannerism remains entirely subordinate
to “its working relation with the Baroque” (37). It is only in his last course
at Vincennes, in which he draws a parallel between Michelangelo and
Leibniz (see van Tuinen 2011), that Deleuze wonders whether we possess
“the means to give a certain philosophical consistency to the concept of
mannerism,” which in addition he labels “the most evident, the most
certain theme of our investigations this year”:
For, after all, mannerism as we all know has some very particular
relations—either interior or anterior or posterior—precisely with the
Baroque. But we feel sorry for the [art] critics who seem to have so much
trouble in defining mannerism. We might as well change everything,
change place, and tell ourselves: very well, couldn’t philosophy help
them out, since they experience such difficulty to define mannerism in
art? Maybe philosophy gives us a very simple means to define man-
nerism? (CGD 07/04/1987)

My aim here is to render Mannerism separable again from the

Baroque. Attempts by art history and art criticism to define Mannerism
will be juxtaposed with close-readings of key passages in Deleuze’s work,
especially from Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, which considers the
art of 20th-century British figurative painter Francis Bacon, as well as from
The Fold. From the concept of the “Figure” developed in the former, I will
distill an initial concept of Mannerism as an art that proceeds by way of
diagrammatic deformation. I will then compare this concept to Deleuze’s
concept of the Baroque (the “fold taken to infinity”) and argue that, while
the Baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolutionary “catastrophe” of
Mannerism to the extreme, it simultaneously and paradoxically forms a
conservative and restorative reaction to it. It is by exploring Mannerism’s
“very particular relations” with the Baroque, finally, that we can also

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discover in Mannerism a precursor to 20th-century Modernism, and in

Deleuze’s modernist allegiance, several neo-mannerist tendencies.

Method in Art History and Philosophy

The twentieth century has seen two major attempts to reinterpret
and revalue Mannerism in terms of positive, albeit non-classical purposes.
The first was prepared by Alois Riegl’s studies of late Roman art (1901)
and of baroque art (1908) and can be situated in the 1920s in Germany
and Austria. While the founders of art history (besides Riegl, Wölfflin)
struggled to explain the phenomenon of the Baroque, their pupils—among
them scholars such as Max Dvôrák (1924), Walter Friedländer (1925) and
Nikolaus Pevsner (1928)—undertook a first canonization. Since among
the “Gothic,” the “Renaissance” and the “Baroque,” Mannerism alone is
an “ism” and more than any stylistic epoch problematizes style (a purely
processual and programmatic term), it solicited analogies with modernist
movements such as expressionism, to which it provided an alternative to
the opposition between academic realism and impressionistic idealism.
As Erwin Panofsky acknowledges in his classic Idea (1924),
Expressionism is related to mannerism in more than one sense, it comes
with the particular speculation that guides us back to the paths followed
by the metaphysics of art from the 16th century theory, paths that seek to
derive the phenomenon of artistic creativity from an extrasensory and
absolute, or as we say today, cosmic principle. (Cassirer & Panofsky 149)

Moreover, the expressionists recognized in Mannerism a spiritual catas-

trophe that prefigured the catastrophes of their own time:
One could speak of a spiritual catastrophe, which preceded the political
one, and which consisted of the collapse of the old, worldly, ecclesiasti-
cally, scientifically and artistically dogmatic systems and categories of
thought. What we observe with Michelangelo and Tintoretto on the
limited field of artistic problems was the criterion of the whole age. The
paths which until then had led to knowledge and to the construction of
a spiritual culture, were abandoned, with the result an apparent chaos,
just like our own age appears to us as chaotic. (Dvôrák 270)

The second attempt emerged in and around the 1960s when more
specialized works flourished with scholars such as Sypher (1955), Battisti
(1960), Würtemberger (1962-68), Bousquet (1964), Briganti (1965), Malraux
(1974) and Longhi (1976). As forty years before, Curtius (1957) and Hocke
(1957), and more recently Maiorino (1991), discovered in Mannerism a
“first ‘modern’ avant-garde,” a precursor to the work of Cézanne and
Klee, Kollwitz and Matisse. For them Mannerism is not just the name for
the style of the cinquecento; it is used for a surrealistic and structurally
anti-classicist phenomenon that critics see recurring throughout European
art, from Monsù Desiderio to De Chirico and from Arcimboldo to Breton.
Classicism is no longer identified only with the High Renaissance, but with

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168 Sjoerd van Tuinen

any ordered or formed milieu whatsoever; while Mannerism is identified

with a proto-revolutionary tendency towards abstraction, monstrosity
or terribilità. Others such as Hauser (1964) or Klaniczay (1971) put Man-
nerism in relation to ideological movements, which, like expressionism,
are seen as stemming from the unrest of their age. Whereas the decades
around 1500 constituted a period of great hopes for harmony and toler-
ance, reflected in ideals of humanism and perfection, the 16th century
brought to light the weaknesses of early capitalism, being a time marked
by diseases and famines caused by urban overpopulation, and a crisis in
faith and conscience that culminated with the closure of the Council of
Trent in 1563, the rise of absolutism and the Inquisition, and of course
the sack of Rome. As a consequence, the mannerist artist found himself
“alienated” in a situation of social uprooting. This situation became even
more precarious with the conquest of equality between the mechanical
arts and the liberal arts in defiance of the trade guilds, as it consigned the
artist to the capricious patronage of nobles, while also requiring him to
actively justify himself in public controversy. Yet whereas mannerists still
represented the spiritual elite of their age, upholding the cosmopolitan
attitude of Renaissance humanism, this position was soon, in the Baroque,
to become an anachronism.
Most of the art historical inspiration and references in the arguments
that follow come from these major attempts to provide a “modernist”
concept of Mannerism and to differentiate it from the Baroque. It should
be emphasized, however, that this is a methodological decision. Although
the last decades have brought to light many important new findings on
particular figures, currents and controversies of the sixteenth century, no
new sweeping attempts have been made to give an encompassing defi-
nition of Mannerism. Hence the problem of its diverging interpretations
and evaluations has never really been solved. Instead, it’s as though the
ambition or nature of art history’s relation to historical episodes itself has
changed to the point that it has become both impossible to use and impos-
sible to abandon the notion of Mannerism (Pinelli xxi). Because of this,
my own aim is not to return to art historical questions such as whether
Mannerism should be considered a historical, geographical, cyclical or
structural phenomenon; whether it is typical of a specific art or whether
it is common to all arts; whether it is bound to a certain ideology; which
artists can be grouped together under its label, etc. The problem this
paper addresses is another one. Today we are told that Mannerism is a
twentieth century “construction” (Bredekamp), as if it were possible to
do away with the concept forever. But is it not true that the essence of
stylistic epochs is that they can be determined only retroactively; that they
possessed no more reality in that actuality when they are said to have
been actual?1 In fact, Bredekamp’s conclusion is the natural outcome of

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Deleuze and Mannerism 169

developments in art history that have led to a more and more positivist
and objectivist approach to art. With respect to Mannerism, this shift in
method is exemplified by the work of John Shearman, and more recently,
that of Antonio Pinelli, and that of Daniel Arasse & Andreas Tönnesman.
In each case, the inverse correlation between the extension of the concept
and its comprehension (the commonplace that the broader the concept,
the weaker it becomes) is the main reason for giving up on the search
for a final definition of Mannerism. But perhaps, as Deleuze suggests,
philosophy offers a different way out....
Instead of reproducing, historicizing or even summarizing all the
controversies that abound in the determination of its extension, I take
seriously Deleuze’s claim that a philosophical concept in itself contains
neither extension nor comprehension, and that its power lies exclusively
in the heterogenesis of its prehensive intension—that is, in the singular
tendencies that it brings together according to “the logic of the AND”
rather than of the “IS” (A Thousand Plateaus 25). In fact, philosophical
concepts have neither an eternal identity nor an actual history, but only
the virtual becoming they construct and concretize. Unlike scientific “func-
tives,” therefore, they posit themselves and their objects at one and the
same time (What is Philosophy? 11). While “straddling”2 as many diverse
fields as possible, they abandon all reference to the actual, and instead
involve only allusions to it: philosophy as speculation or science fiction
(ibid.160-61). The criterion for well-made concepts, Deleuze argues, lies
not in the analogy, similarity, opposition or even compossibility of their
referents (the exoconsistency of materials and sources), but rather in the
“maximum of variables which they allow” (Dialogues II 144), their internal
variability or endoconsistency. This means that philosophical concepts
always correspond to a multiplicity, a system of entangled, connected,
bifurcating trajectories (ibid. viii). Given the pandemonium of mutually
contradicting determinations of Mannerism and their various returns in
Modernism, we should seek systematic reconnections between them in a
new virtual order. If Mannerism distinguishes itself from the Renaissance
and the Baroque by its extreme variety of styles, this is not a reason to
refrain from using the term, as some would have it (Hall 9), but on the
contrary is a reason to construct it anew. In the end, this is not to abstract
it from art history, but to extract a philosophical concept from it that can
do justice to the “confusing, incomprehensible and inexhaustible wealth”
(Hauser 24) of art itself. At stake is Mannerism not as object of inquiry,
but as a field of operation and creative thought—a slice of chaos turned
into a consistent event. Without wanting to compete with art historians,
yet by relating to the historical reception of works of art as much as pos-
sible, the question here is not what Mannerism is, but what mannerists
do or how they work.

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170 Sjoerd van Tuinen

Mannerism: Rendering Time Visible

Mannerism is often said to begin with Michelangelo. Whereas
Alberti warned the artist against placing too much trust in his genius,
advising him to confine himself to the great model that is created nature,
Michelangelo relied on his ingegno—the power of his artistic mind to im-
prove nature instead of merely imitating it. According to his most famous
sonnet, he held that “the best artist has no concept [concetto] which some
single marble does not potentially enclose within its mass, but only the
hand which obeys the intellect [intelletto] can accomplish it” (16). This
Neo-Platonic reference to the intellect should not be understood in anach-
ronistic, subjectivist terms. The maker of David cannot be abstracted from
the divine spark (scintilla di dio) or divine sign (segno di dio, Lomazzo’s
quasi-anagram of disegno [see also van Tuinen 2014]) that inspires him,
nor can the conceptual stage of the work of art be disconnected from its
actual application in execution. (Zuccaro Book I, ch. 3 & Book II, ch. 6) In
Deleuze’s terms, Michelangelo is a visionary or seer of ideas, provided
that these are “treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of ex-
pression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression, such
that I cannot say that I have an idea in general” (Two Regimes of Madness
312. Whereas in classical representation the potential idea slumbering in
a given material is first “seen” by the eye of the intellect and then realized
in manual work, Mannerism—the Italian maniera deriving from mano,
hand—sets up a “frenetic zone in which the hand is no longer guided
by the eye and is forced upon sight like another will” (Deleuze, Francis
Bacon 137). Implicit to this understanding of Mannerism as “manual in-
trusion” (ibid.138) is that the complete execution of a work of art is not
indispensable. The conceptual character of non finito works of art such as
the Pitti Tondo (1503-04) or the Prigioni (1520-32) reflects the artist’s poetic
virtuosity precisely insofar as it is inseparable from the manual act that
executes it (Barolsky). Hence what Mannerism reflectively discovers, in
Deleuzean terms, is the idea as virtual “diagram” or “abstract machine”
(A Thousand Plateaus 496) of art—not what the artist is the author of, but
the set of asignifying and nonrepresentative signs of the material that he
puts to work and on which he relies. The question of creativity is how
we go from these virtual dispositions, inclinations or tendencies of still
unformed matter to their consolidation in a form without submitting to
the transcending illusions of subjectivity or preformed possibility. As we
shall see, the answer lies in the notion of manner or style.
At first sight, however, Deleuze’s link with Michelangelo appears in
a more indirect form. The only text in which Deleuze explicitly discusses
Michelangelo is Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, in which he claims
that with Mannerism there appears “a properly pictorial atheism” (9).
This is exemplified by a mannerist painter deeply influenced by Michel-

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angelo—El Greco. His The Burial of Count Orgaz (1562) is divided between,
on the lower half, “a figuration or narration that represents the burial of
the Count” and, on the upper half, “a wild liberation, a total emancipa-
tion: the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure,
outside all constraint” (ibid.). The point Deleuze makes is that just as
Bacon in the 20th century freed the canvas from the “natural” regime of
photographic clichés, mannerists like El Greco relieved figures of their
representative, terrestrial role and made them enter directly into an order
of celestial sensations, where even “divine Figures are wrought by a free
creative work, by a fantasy in which everything is permitted” (ibid.10.
This doesn’t imply a loss of spirituality, however. Mannerism utilizes
figurative depictions in its quest to incarnate more intense spiritual pres-
ences than classicism was capable of. Its great invention is incorporating
images of both terrestrial and celestial spheres in one canvas—an inven-
tion that would remain crucial for all further development of Christian
iconography. In fact, it seeks a spirituality that is almost Gothic, yet with
an unrest and complexity unlikely to be found in Gothic art. Content to
refer to the existing code of the Church, it transforms spirituality into a
“will to art” that lies not in the imitation of nature or the communication
of a sacred narrative, but in the expressive maniera that is “not only the
trace of a particular hand and its inextricable habits, but an expression of
a spiritual particularity” (Emison 52). As Max Dvôrák famously argues in
his 1924 study “Über El Greco und den Manierismus,” it was against the
backdrop of the spiritual catastrophe in a country such as Spain (where
the Reformation was not institutionalized, but prompted unlimited “in-
ternalization”) that El Greco sought to “push to the limit the elements
of an art of expression” in order to “subordinate the natural models to
his artistic inspiration” (Dvorak 261-75). Even if historical Mannerism is
religious art par excellence, it simultaneously betrays the dominant af-
fective and signifying regimes. “Christianity contains a germ of tranquil
atheism that will nurture painting; the painting can easily be indifferent
to the religious subject it is asked to represent” (Francis Bacon 124). It is
precisely this mannerist paradox of an “atheist spirituality” (Ambrose)
that Deleuze rediscovers in Bacon’s crucifixions and popes, where the
residues of figuration still form an important framework within the
overall diagram.
According to Deleuze, the will to art in painting initially expresses
itself in the abstract, aberrant line of which classical “[f]iguration and nar-
ration are only effects” (Francis Bacon 136, 46). Bacon can be qualified as
mannerist insofar as he escapes from classical figuration neither through
abstraction towards pure form without matter, as in Mondriaan or Kan-
dinsky, nor through the rejection of all form, as in Fautrier or Pollock,
but through the extraction or isolation of the “figural”: a “catastrophic”

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172 Sjoerd van Tuinen

disruption of the link that relates sensation to an object (illustration) or

that relates it to other images in a composite whole that assigns an objec-
tive place to each of them (narration). Whereas illustration and narration
are established by resemblance or by convention, and thus bear witness
to the dominance of some other faculty over sensation, “the violence of
sensation” in itself consists not of signifying relations but of “a properly
pictorial (or sculptural) ligature” (ibid. 161) devoid of analogy or code.
What Bacon calls the brutality of fact is an “event” that is “made” in a
body of sensation that cannot be reduced to either an object of reference
or the lived experience of a seeing subject, but refers exclusively to the
rhythmic agitation of the materials of which it is composed, and the man-
ner in which these are brought together (ibid. 34-5). Similarly, in the Doni
Tondo (The Holy Family [1503]), Michelangelo developed an unprecedented
isolation of the bodies. Although formally modelled after Leonardo’s now
lost second cartoon for St Anne (1501), it replaces its effect of balance and
stability, containing and controlling movement in extensive form, with
an aggressive contrapposto that will reappear constantly in Michelangelo’s
succeeding works, and that exposes a much stronger energy articulating
an internal unity of form: “It is as if the organisms were caught up in a
whirling or serpentine movement that gives them a single ‘body’ or unites
them in a single ‘fact,’ apart from any figurative or narrative connection,”3
Deleuze writes (ibid. 130-1). Whether in the case of Bacon or in that of
Michelangelo, the figural “matter of fact” (ibid. 4) is overwhelmed by the
presence of a visceral spirituality that unifies and animates the composi-
tion outside all spatiotemporal coordinates. “In the history of art,” Deleuze
therefore suggests, “it was perhaps Michelangelo who made us grasp the
existence of such a fact most forcefully. … It was with Michelangelo, with
mannerism, that the Figure or the pictorial fact was born in its pure state”
(ibid. 160-1; Two Regimes of Madness 182).
The most striking consequence of this spiritual break with represen-
tation is deformation—“deformation as an act of painting” (Francis Bacon
59). Whereas classical representation “takes the accident into an optical
organization that makes it something well founded (a phenomenon) or
a ‘manifestation’ of essence” (ibid. 126), the ornate postures of manner-
ist Figures are not fixed individual forms, but deform human perception
itself. As Walter Friedländer puts it:
The form of appearance, heretofore canonical, commonly recognized
in an intersubjective way and hence counted upon as something one
could take for granted—as “natural,” is given up in favour of a new,
subjective, “unnatural” creation. … Thus there arises a new beauty,
no longer resting on real forms measurable by the model or on forms
idealized on this basis, but rather on an inner artistic reworking on the
basis of harmonic or rhythmical requirements. (6-8)

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Deleuze and Mannerism 173

Deleuze himself draws on two other pupils of Wölfflin—Aloïs Riegl

and Wilhelm Worringer—who define classical representation by the aes-
thetic laws that force sensation into moulds that serve the perfection of
optical contours in deep, linear perspectival space, which in turn “first
of all expresses the organic life of man as subject” (Francis Bacon 125-6).
In optical space, the contour line is no longer the common limit of fore-
ground and background on a single plane, but “the self-limitation of the
form” (ibid.125), since it gives primacy to the foreground by subjecting it
to natural forms. A “technical plane of composition” (What is Philosophy?
193) projects sensation onto a well-prepared and calm surface, whose
very material seems to include the mathematical rules of perspective. By
contrast, Mannerism denaturalizes the organic-transcendental regime of
classicism by setting up a “haptic” space in which there is only a “shal-
low depth” or an almost sculptural “thickness” that simultaneously
separates and intertwines foreground and background. In Michelangelo’s
sculptures, the “veins in marble” (The Fold 4) are allowed to rise to the
surface. Similarly, Bacon literally wipes out perceptual clichés by throwing
paint or using rags, brooms, brushes, or a sponge. Either way, a manual
diagram decodes optical depth by manipulating the prepictorial order of
“figurative probabilities” into “free manual traits” (Francis Bacon 98) that
reorient the visual whole: “manipulated chance, as opposed to conceived or
seen probabilities” (ibid. 94). Starting from any “operative set of traits and
color patches, of lines and zones” (ibid.101-02), mannerist art thus lays
out a properly artistic or “aesthetic plane of composition” on which “it
is no longer sensation that is realized in the material but the material that
passes into sensation” (What is Philosophy? 194). Since the hand is no longer
dominated by the eye, contours are forced into relation with all kinds of
abstract forces of “pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elonga-
tion” (Francis Bacon 58). In his Doni Tondo, Michelangelo thus confronts
formed nature with the unformed violence of sensation from which he
extracts the Figure, as Deleuze describes:
Certainly there is still an organic representation, but even more pro-
foundly, we witness the revelation of the body beneath the organism,
which makes organisms and their elements crack or swell, imposes a
spasm on them, and puts them into relation with forces: sometimes
with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces
that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging
time, sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time. (ibid. 161)

The body beneath the organism is a “Body without Organs,” a body

on which you “sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe
with your belly” (A Thousand Plateaus 151). It is the body of a haptic
spirituality, “a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the

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174 Sjoerd van Tuinen

body without organs” (Francis Bacon 47, 20-21). It is not spiritual in the
religious or even theological sense, meaning over and against something
material or somehow “purely” spiritual, but in the sense of a vitality that
precedes the extended body or the organism. The latter are only the low-
est intensities or the weakest spiritual forces of the body without organs,
which is traversed by a myriad of other vital rhythms. Thus in painting,
the Figure is composed of line-color intensities and polyvalent organs
that convey sensation through vibrating movements or nervous waves
“beyond all measure or cadence.” It is a “hysteric” body with “eyes all
over” (Francis Bacon 52), each eye corresponding only to the “temporary
and provisional presence” (ibid. 48) of a certain constellation of forces.
For it is not a question of a single force altering the initial tranquility of
the image, but rather of a contrasting series of imbalances that lead to
permanent instability (Oliva 11). The hallucinatory character of the Doni
Tondo is the result of a spiritual will that seeks vital forces beyond organic
cognitions. These forces are perturbations that decompose the figurative
unity of the image and open it up to a whole field of turbulence. With
Mannerism, it becomes the aim of art to capture this turbulence in sensible
intuitions. Art becomes an abstract machine, provided that it expresses
the “real abstraction” of nonorganic life, as opposed to the “ideal abstrac-
tion” of the geometric line or of the formless (Francis Bacon 48, 63-4; Two
Regimes of Madness 178).
The great achievement of mannerist deformation is that it renders
time or life visible in painting—not just a time that flows and can be
narrated as such, but also one that is always out of step, enduring and
coexisting with other times in an open “Whole which is constantly be-
coming” (Cinema 1 82; Francis Bacon 48). In breaking up the continuum of
successive perceptions and replacing it with the transspatial simultaneity
of different stages of movement, the typical figura serpentinata fixes the
fact of movement, its spiritual presence, in an instantaneous becoming:
“What we call ‘fact’ is first of all the fact that several forms may actually
be included in one and the same Figure, indissolubly, caught up in a kind
of serpentine, like so many necessary accidents continually mounting on
top of one another” (Francis Bacon 160). If there is still an optical resem-
blance between the strained postures of Michelangelo’s figures or Bacon’s
spasmodic distortions, on the one hand, and natural images on the other,
this is no longer pre-formed by an optical model, but is the effect of a
“variable and continuous mould”—of a manual “modulation” of plastic
forces (Francis Bacon 97-98). For just as becoming is never an imitation,
resemblance neither has nor lacks a reference (A Thousand Plateaus 237; The
Fold 95). Rather, it is always an “analogical expression,” “a resemblance

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Deleuze and Mannerism 175

produced with accidental and non-resembling means” (Francis Bacon 98,

115, 158). Wylie Sypher says precisely this when he situates Michelan-
gelo’s sculptural technique between Donatello’s method of cutting away
from the block and Bernini’s expanding of volumes around an armature
that is already in place: “The paradox of Michelangelo’s statuary is that
the vigorous carving creates, strangely, an effect of modeled volumes”
(30). Perhaps this is the ultimate consequence of a truly pragmatist and
materialist conception of spirituality: the mannerist paradox of a Neo-
Platonist overturning of Platonism, replacing resemblances between
beings with manners of resembling or “becomings.” Manner or style is
precisely this “excessive presence, the identity of an already-there and
an always-delayed” (Francis Bacon 51) beyond all actual figuration. It is
what preserves the rhythmic unity of a sensation—its spiritual duration
on the surface of sense (the realm of simulacra): “Bacon’s whole ‘style’
takes place in a beforehand and an afterward: what takes place before the
painting has even begun, but also what takes place afterward, a hysteresis
that will break off the work each time, interrupt its figurative course, and
yet give it back afterward ….” (ibid. 50).
This irreducibility of style or duration to any actual figuration can-
not be emphasized enough, since mannerist procedures of deformation
are usually judged by art historians in the 17th-century pejorative sense of
manierato—either as unnecessary artificial or arty deviations from some
classical model suggestive of effortless accomplishments (sprezzatura),
or as angst-ridden indulgences in the grotesque.4 By contrast, Deleuze
emphasizes that such explanations are correct only if a figuration or a
narration is reintroduced (“stress, pain, or anguish”), whereas Bacon,
like Michelangelo, presents us with “the most natural of postures, as if
we caught them ‘between’ two stories, or when we were alone, listening
to a force that had seized us” (ibid. 161). But if “mannerist” could never
be sufficiently distinguished from “mannered,” perhaps this is because
manner is never identified as immanent deviation, rather than a mere
deviation of something that is already given. From the perspective of a
logic of sensation, it is classicism that is unnatural, since it allows only for
spectacular or theatrical movements from one figurative form to another,
while staying at the same optical level of sensation, whereas Mannerism
implies a “static deformation” (ibid.18) that moves almost indiscernibly
from one intensity or manner of sensation to another within a single
Figure. In this sense, Mannerism turns out to be particularly true-to-life—
not to our lived perceptions, but to the vital forces underneath.5 It is “a
kind of declaration of faith in life” (ibid. 61, 43), defined by “a realism of
deformation, as opposed to the idealism of transformation” (ibid.130).

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The Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk and its Mannerist Interstices

Deleuze opens The Fold by stating that “The baroque refers not to
an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait” (3). This op-
erative function is that of the fold continued to infinity. It is only in the
Baroque that the fold exceeds the replication of the contours of a finite
body and becomes itself constitutive of form, instead of being attributed
to something that is folded, as an accident affecting a form or essence.
The fold is thus no longer the frivolous decoration of a well-founded
form; it is rather the dynamic relation between ornament and basis itself.
Forms are no longer forms of content, coinciding with the contours of the
content-matter over which they are folded. Rather, as “formal element or
form of expression,” the fold is a matter-function that “determines and
materializes Form” (34-38). Just as baroque garments surround the body
with their broad, distending waves without betraying it, Bernini doesn’t
sculpt a body covered over with a wrinkled coat, but bends matter of
variable density or texture and distills from it a body that is lost in a dra-
pery of velour, such that the folds of the tunic of Bernini’s Saint Theresa
or the cloak of Louis XIV “turn [the body] inside out and … mold its in-
ner surfaces” (122). This expressive “autonomy of the fold” endows the
material with the capacity to become expressive by itself, and to exceed
the content that is expressed in it: “In relation to the many folds that it is
capable of becoming, matter becomes a matter of expression”’ and hence
“The search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of
the material” (122). Instead of subjective conditions or an overarching
cultural code, it is thus primarily the material workings of the work of
art (such as the strata that determine the cohesion of stone or wood or the
differentials between light and dark in oil paint) that condition the work
of art. In sum: “Matter that reveals its texture becomes raw material, just
as form that reveals its folds becomes force. In the Baroque the coupling
of material-force is what replaces matter and form” (35).
Although neither Bacon nor Michelangelo figure in The Fold, Deleuze
rediscovers in the Baroque many of their mannerist traits, such as the
haptic diagram, the renewal of spirituality, the Figure as a specific escape
from figuration, the hysteric body, and the realism of deformation. Just as
in the figural painting of Bacon, the move toward deformation does not
deny form; the baroque art of the fold is an “informal art par excellence
… but informal is not a negation of the form” (35, translation modified).
Rather, baroque abstraction is precisely what “posits form as folded,”
since baroque materials can only be worked through the folds they already
hold. The fold is the “genetic element” (14, 35) of the actual work—the
unformed potential that precedes every form and in which each form
will ultimately dissolve. There can be no extrinsic criterion according to

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Deleuze and Mannerism 177

which a figure can be judged complete, nor a creatio ex nihilo, since every
creation is the result of a procedure to which it remains immanent. Like a
cloud, each figure already contains the germ of another figure, such that
instead of a pre-given model there is a pre-folded material substrate. An
artist begins from the middle, between matter and form, and proceeds in a
haptic manner—pli selon pli—continuing the asignifying traits of a material
texture in which each fold is a potential site of rupture of an actual form.
Whereas Bacon deforms figures by brushing, scrubbing or perturbing a
zone of the body, the “free and painterly style” of the Baroque (Wölfflin)
elongates and distends its figures by proliferating folds that absorb their
contours. In this way, the Baroque pursues an “infinite work or process”
since its “problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to
have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity” (The Fold 34).
Just as Michelangelo played with the double function of sculpture and
architecture in the Biblioteca Laurenziana (1571) or the Medici chapel at San
Lorenzo (1524), Bernini’s churches and palazzi are intermedial works in
which painting, sculpture and architecture are successively folded into
one another.6 The separate, finite media exceed their frames and become
motifs for one another on a shared continuous plane of composition. As
in Mannerism, the work of art thus refers to an infinite sequence of aber-
rant durations or accidental forms caught up in a wider, abstract move-
ment. As Deleuze notes, “The object is manneristic, not essentializing: it
becomes an event” (ibid.19).
So how is Mannerism distinguished from the Baroque? Of what does
Mannerism’s “working relation (rapport opératoire) to the baroque” (36-
37) consist? Perhaps an answer can be found when Deleuze speaks, in a
variation upon this formula, of “the working relation (l’identité opératoire)
of the baroque and the fold” (34). Taken together, these two propositions
seem to indicate that Mannerism relates to the Baroque in the same way
as does the fold. Deleuze adds, “The paradigm becomes ‘mannerist, and
proceeds to a formal deduction of the fold” (38). Mannerism, in other
words, is an operative and paradigmatic precondition for the Baroque.
Can we then say that Mannerism consists of the haptic treatment of the
diagrammatic features of the Baroque—that is, folds?
Yet if the Baroque receives its operative identity via the fold, the
same is not necessarily true of Mannerism. Deleuze gives numerous
other historical examples of diagrams that deform the classical regime of
optical contours and perspective. Among them, the hallucinatory play of
light and shadow in Byzantine art and the manipulation of the contour
line in Gothic art still play an important role in the historical context of
16th-century Italy. The Byzantine painting of light subsists in the fluid
chiaroscuro of the Venetian mannerists, especially Tintoretto, whereas the

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178 Sjoerd van Tuinen

violence of the Gothic line is a common trait of the Dürer-inspired Man-

nerism of Florence and Rome embodied by Pontormo or Parmigianino.
More importantly, the Baroque also differs from Mannerism with
respect to its aim. Whereas the decades around 1500 constituted a period
of great hopes for harmony and tolerance, reflected in ideals of human-
ism and perfection, the 16th century brought to light the weaknesses of
early capitalism. Following Hauser and Klaniczay, to whom Deleuze
refers in The Fold (151 n18), both Mannerism and the Baroque mirror the
spiritual, material and intellectual crises that brought about the decline of
the Renaissance. They constitute a “crisis of property” (110), “a crisis and
collapse of all theological Reason” and a “psychotic episode” (67-68). Yet
if the crisis forces the paradigm to become mannerist, the Baroque uses
this paradigm in the “schizophrenic reconstruction” of a regime of form
and spirituality “on another stage” (68) that corresponds to the theological
exigencies of what Leibniz termed pre-established harmony. For no matter
how infinite, decentred and fluid the world has become, in the Baroque,
as Wölfflin says, “a harmonious solution is always found in the end” (19).
According to Klaniczay, there is a strong heretic tendency in Man-
nerism that is on a par with the Baroque attempt to reimpose a unitary
sense and composed order upon the world. The (Catholic) Baroque is
the cultural superstructure of re-established feudalism: an ultimate but
temporary and reactionary consolidation of medieval structures—la Foi,
la Loi, le Roi—whereas Mannerism held fast to the revolutionary tenden-
cies of the Renaissance (Klaniczay 1972; Klaniczay 1977: 21, 29, 142, 214).
Or as Sypher puts it, the Baroque answer to mannerist “disintegration”
was a “reintegration” by means of an overwhelming magniloquence that
disarms the violence of sensation and restores it to the violence of the figu-
rative spectacle (183-85, 34). In a similar fashion, what Deleuze recognizes
in Leibniz is the ultimate attempt to come to terms with a mannerist world
and to save Aristotelian hylomorphism. If the paradigm is mannerist, then
“the extreme specificity of the baroque” (The Fold 34) must be the formal
deduction of the fold from the theatrum naturae et artis that is the world as
it is composed by God—an intricately interlocked total work of art made
up of literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, urban planning, and
music, like Bernini’s ideal of bel composto—the harmonious unity of dif-
ferent media. Indeed, all these intermedial foldings are inseparable from
a Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk that, like a great chain of being, guarantees
the unity of a Whole without which their in-between tensions would be
kept hanging in suspense. In response to the baroque horror vacui, a fram-
ing totality is the necessary condition for any meaningful crossover. The
demand for pre-established harmony then is what makes the ambition of
the Baroque surpass that of Mannerism. Instead of material contingencies,

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Deleuze and Mannerism 179

the Baroque seeks material reassurances: by the Counter-Reformatory

sanctioning of the veneration of images and of the piety of the body, by
activating rhythmical movements between the dynamic forces of heavy
matter (“extrema that define the stability of the figures, figures that or-
ganize masses, masses that follow an extrinsic vector of gravity or of the
greatest incline” [ibid.102]), and by framing the infinity of space within
hermetic, or monadic, enclosures (Cf. Sypher 185-211; The Fold 28). The
Baroque thus forms the basis of a “concertation” of matter that functions
like an “ideal causality” (The Fold 133-34), a musical ordering of folds all
the way into the metaphysical domain of essential forms or eternal spirit-
souls that extract from the physical world a “higher unity to which the
other arts are moving as so many melodic lines” (ibid.128). This is why
Leibniz’s monads have “special hooks” (“vincoli”) attached to them over
which the infinite fold of the Baroque is distributed, to avert the danger
of a radicalized Mannerism—of truly immanent styles or essences whose
philosophical father is perhaps Spinoza rather than Leibniz.
Deleuze sees this compromise between the collapse of form in the
pleats of matter and the ascension of spirit exemplified in two paint-
ings that mark the transition of Mannerism into Baroque: Tintoretto’s
Last Judgment (1586-88) and El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz, each
of which is divided by an infinitely folded horizontal line that unites
the heavy bodies pressed against each other below with the rising soul
above (ibid. 30). Whereas the lower level appears as a normal figurative
representation—“although already all the coefficients of the deformation
of bodies, and notably their elongation, are already at work” (Francis Bacon
9)—this appearance is founded on the expression of a fold attached to a
formal unity of composition that exists “only as a ‘mental landscape’ in
the soul or in the mind” and as such “includes immaterial folds” (ibid.
35, 125). In terms of Leibniz, this is the presence of reasonable souls that
have been elevated to the “grander stage” of freedom and who are “free
to fall back down at death and to climb up again at the last judgment”
(The Fold 11). Hence whereas in The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze laid the
emphasis on the mannerist or atheist aspects of El Greco’s painting, in The
Fold he invokes the same painting as exemplary witness to a more pious,
baroque spirituality: “It is with God that everything is permitted” and,
indeed, that “Everything is made to pass through the code” (Francis Bacon
10), but only insofar as “everything” contributes to a higher harmony.
The baroque autonomy of the fold does not occur through a complete
break with well-founded forms, but re-establishes the latter by taking
the fold “through the ceiling” and tying it to a transcendent level where
it remains subject to the form of totality of the world, as it is included by
each soul and as it was chosen by God (“the best,” excluding all other

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180 Sjoerd van Tuinen

possible worlds) (The Fold 133). The exaltation of the Baroque lies precisely
in this tense unity of physical gravity and spiritual elevation: “We move
from the funerary figures of the Basilica of San Lorenzo to the figures on
the ceiling of San Ignazio” (11). On the one hand, then, we find atheism
at work as the artistic power of the Baroque. But on the other hand, its
spiritual potential is kept at bay by the metaphysical coherence of the
World, the Soul, and of God.
In sum, if Mannerism expresses the immanent yet relative deterri-
torialization of well-founded forms, then the Baroque’s play with tricky
perspectives, optical illusions, complicated anamorphoses and harmonic
dissonances expresses its constant reterritorialization on transcendent
forms outside the material world. Between Mannerism and the Baroque,
the problem has changed. Whereas the mannerist diagram is a means of
constructing a new world, the baroque fold is about revealing the world
as it already exists, although virtually, as infinite totality, even if “in re-
spect to new principles capable of justifying it” (The Fold 68). The fold is
paradigmatic for the ex cathedra submission of the Counter-Reformation
to the uncertainties and flexibilities of the mannerist world. It is indeed
the abstract machine of the Baroque, but the Baroque remains merely
parasitical on Mannerism’s will to abstraction. Folding is precisely the
manner in which the Baroque solves local dissonances and reinstalls a
meaningful totality that prevails over the folds of which it is composed.
“In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual
labor” and becomes “all the more total for being fragmented” (A Thousand
Plateaus 6). After the total aestheticization of politics and the total politi-
cization of art, by contrast, the relevance of the total work of art can only
lie in its failure, where it reveals its fragmentary nature and its unformed
interstices. Instead of attributing a neo-baroque side to Deleuze, as so
many commentators have done, it might be more adequate to speak of
a “Neo-Mannerism.”

Modernism as Neo-Mannerism
Searching for the roots of the contemporary before the French
Revolution7 was long considered pointless. Recently, however, many have
argued that the return of the Baroque is the sign of our time. The concept
of “Neo-Baroque” might be more appropriate for our historical period
than the more ideological concept of “Postmodernism.” This was perhaps
Deleuze’s inspiration in The Fold, when he argued that in the second half
of the twentieth century, with composers such as Cage or Berio and artists
ranging from Dubuffet to Rauschenberg, “we have a new baroque and a
neo-leibnizianism” (The Fold 136). By contrast, the more scarce attempts
to give a contemporary revalidation to the concept of Mannerism are usu-
ally based on the assumption that Postmodernism relates to Modernism

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Deleuze and Mannerism 181

as Mannerism does to Classicism. As Robert Venturi has recently argued,

Mannerism, like Postmodernism, is rich in its contradictory dimensions,
in its paradoxical alliances, in its multiple evolutions—to such an extent
that its mobility becomes its very essence. Today, as in the 16th century, we
discover in art and literature many mannerist traits: a fervent erudition
and a sharp critical spirit; a painful melancholy (but often crafted upon
the rhythm and love for life, and willing to take great risks); an homage
to intelligence and imagination while also cultivating the patient work of
the hand and genius in their strangeness; the play of surfaces and loss of
interpretation; the replacement of emotive affect with libidinal energies;
the splintering of subjectivity, and more (Venturi & Scott Brown esp. 73-104
and 212-17; cf. also Massumi). Yet these parallels between Postmodernism
and Mannerism seem at odds with art historical accounts of Mannerism,
in which the latter appears as a direct precursor to Modernism’s response
to realism, whereas the Baroque seems more closely related to Modern-
ism’s postmodern sublimation. Indeed, although both the Baroque and
Mannerism are both extraordinarily sensual and expressive forms of art,
the Baroque is riotous (deftig), popular, opulent, pompous, and figura-
tive, while Mannerism is refined, elitist, avant-gardist, intellectual, and
abstract. We might therefore argue that the Baroque relates to Mannerism
as Postmodernism does to Modernism. Perhaps it is for similar reasons
that Deleuze too rejects the Postmodern, a rejection of the Post-” in favor
of the new? (Bogue 27-41). As is well-known, Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus extensively refuse both Classicism and Romanticism as
models for contemporary art, and propose in their place their own con-
cept of “Modernism.” To what extent might Mannerism be the untimely
contemporary of this concept?
In addition to Francis Bacon, there are several instances where Deleuze
approaches modern art from a mannerist perspective. The earliest is the
chapter on “Essences and the Signs of Art” in Proust and Signs (1964/1973),
which appears deeply inspired by the Neo-Platonism and hermeticism
of 16th-century aesthetic theory. According to Marcel Proust, the signs of
art are “ideas” or “essences” that make us “emerge from ourselves” with
the result that we gain access to other regions of Being enveloping other
worlds: “Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see
it multiply, and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds will
we have at our disposal, more different from each other than those which
spin through infinity” (cited in Proust and Signs 42). As Deleuze explains,
art is able to render present other possible worlds within “everyday life”
(Difference and Repetition 293) because it turns any medium into a “refract-
ing material,” rendering it “ductile” and thus “spiritualizing” it (Proust and
Signs, 46-48).8 In art neither the spectator nor the artist is the foundation
of the way the world looks to us, nor is it the material of the work of art

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182 Sjoerd van Tuinen

in which it is expressed. Rather it is “an absolute and ultimate Difference”

or “difference in itself” that is repeated in a “continuous and refracted
birth” (ibid. 41-44). This expressive power of repetition is what Deleuze
calls an artistic manner or style. Reflecting Bellori’s mannerist principles
of la maniera, o vogliamo dire fantastica idea and la fantastica idea appogiata
alla pratica e non all’imitazione, artistic practice (to the extent that it eludes
all natural or empirical determinations) is based on the unity or complex
identity of idea and style. Through the materials they work with, artists
bring together different objects in order to confer upon them a common,
incorporeal quality without ever confusing these objects with the quality
itself, which remains forever indeterminate.9 Accordingly, the yellow in
Vermeer’s View of Delft is said to be one of those “necessary lenses of a
beautiful style” (Two Regimes of Madness 369) that determines the objects
in their mutual relations by soaking them in an aleatory point of view, as
if some contrast liquid were “reinjected into the visual whole” (Francis
Bacon 138; Proust and Signs 46).
Again we see why Mannerism, in its artistic sense, is more than just
a matter of persiflage, pastiche or imitation of what is already given: “The
whole Search implies a certain argument between art and life,” insofar
as “art appears for what it is, the ultimate goal of life, which life cannot
realize by itself” and “Nature or life, still too heavy, have found in art
their spiritual equivalent” (Proust and Signs 137-38). Prior to any “natural
differentiation,” artistic ideas are “differential” essences or primordial
qualities that form both the “birth of the world” and “the finality of the
world” (ibid. 47-49), without ever being reducible to the subjects or ma-
terials in which they are expressed. Art’s sole aim, then, is to propagate a
singular viewpoint through the world without invoking the recognition
of anything that is already subjectively or objectively given. Whatever
the technical means involved, some perceptions can only be created by
art, since they arise from an “unnatural” eye which, instead of being
transcendentally fixed, is produced by art. In this sense, as Charles de
Tolnay writes, Michelangelo “did not intend to represent things as the
human eye sees them but as they are in essence; not as they appear but
as they are according to their Idea” (85-86). Or as Proust says, an artistic
sign is the mark of “a qualitative difference that there is in the way the
world looks to us, a difference which, if there were no such thing as art,
would remain the eternal secret of each man” (cited in Proust and Signs 41).
Deleuze’s Proustian identity of manner and idea brings us back to
the division of labor between the eye or intellect as faculty of conception,
and the hand as faculty of execution. In Mannerism, the transcendental
organization of anthropocentric space is not given up either to a liberation
of the eye and a repression of all tactility as in Byzantine art, or to a libera-
tion of the hand and a repression of all opticality as in Gothic art. Rather,

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Deleuze and Mannerism 183

it is subjected to an experimental variation of diagrammatic features that

no longer allows for a hand-eye subordination in either direction. Thus if
artistic ideas are incorporeal, this does not mean that they transcend the
corporeal process of their realization. Rather, they constitute the virtual
potential of a material—its immanent becoming. For Deleuze, artistic signs
are neither Platonic ideas nor Aristotelian essences, but entirely operative
ideas that remain coextensive to, and undergo qualitative transformations
with, the materials in which they are expressed. It is precisely non-artistic
signs (“signs of worldliness,” “signs of love” and “sensuous signs”) that
transcend their development (insofar as they retain a natural—subjective
or objective—signification), whereas in art the signs stay fully immanent
to the style of their development. Hence Deleuze’s work after Guattari
makes a considerable effort to escape the idea-matter distinction typical
of classical and mannerist art theories, and to replace it with the “mod-
ern” conjunction of force-matter in which each form is only a temporary
fold of matter-energy. This shift coincides with what is often interpreted
as a move away from Deleuze’s early structuralist conception of the on-
togenesis of the work of art, to the side of the virtual, in order to purge
the plane of composition from any residual idealism.10 Is this a transition
from Mannerism to “matterism,” or from the Logologie to the Texturologie?
(The Fold 35).
Yet even if a more energetic than ideal relation appears between
diagram and sensation, the task of art remains to have a “limitless cor-
poreality” express an “incorporeal power” (A Thousand Plateaus 109). For
matter, according to Deleuze, is only a solidified or frozen spirit, while
spirit is a rarified, gaseous matter or force in its elemental state. Hence
he insists that the artistic idea is a pure idée-force: “the generative force
from which issue the multiple compossible worlds that make up the real”
(Proust and Signs 99). Even in Bacon’s works, we are still dealing, under
the banner of becoming-animal, with the mannerist combination of “the
slowness or heaviness of a matter with the extreme speed of a line that
has become entirely spiritual” (A Thousand Plateaus 498). In this sense,
Deleuze’s Modernism could well be defined as a repetition of Mannerism.
This doesn’t mean, to be sure, that it can be reduced to a copy of Manner-
ism, a reproduction of its actual procedures and ideas. Rather, Modernism
re-effectuates Mannerism, sharing with its own means in a mannerist
intensity or constellation of forces, and hence counter-actualizing the
established image of historical Mannerism.
We find the most outspoken return of this mannerist-matterist
spirituality in Deleuze and Guattari’s programmatic discussion of art’s
capacity for deterritorialization in Anti-Oedipus. Interestingly, the only
example they elaborate in extenso is that of the Venetian School in paint-
ing (Bellini, Giorgione, Titian), which attained “its own grandeur, its own

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184 Sjoerd van Tuinen

genius” when Venetian commodity capitalism, largely based on trade

with Constantinople, began to decline toward the middle of the 15th
century. There occurred not only a “breakdown” of the Byzantine art of
mosaic as a path by which the viewers could transcend their bodies and
regain access to the luminous realm of the divine spirit. The shift from
gessoes to canvas and, more importantly, the introduction of oil painting
to Italy also introduced new traits of expression in art, such as a much
freer brushwork and the layering of glazes of complementary colors that
liberated the play of light and shadow from the systematic addition of
white and black, which in turn was a consequence of the classical valuing
of line over color. (One need only think of Giorgione’s Tempest [1508], in
which the landscape rises up from the background and determines the
atmosphere of the entire painting.) In combination with the demise of
the Byzantine subordination of colors and lines to vertical stratification,
these new techniques enabled Tintoretto and Lotto to inherit the Byzantine
dissolution of classical line in the modulation of light while simultane-
ously affirming the material aspects of paint.11 Referring to Tintoretto’s
Creation of the Animals (ca. 1550) as well as Lotto’s and/or Pellegrino de
San Daniele San Sebastiano (1531 or 1526-29), Deleuze and Guattari write:
What would appear to be another world opens up, an other art, where
the lines are deterritorialized, the colors are decoded, and now only
refer to the relations they entertain among themselves, and with one
another. A horizontal or transverse organization of the canvas is born,
with lines of escape or breakthrough. Christ’s body is engineered on
all sides and in all fashions, pulled in all directions, playing the role of
a full body without organs, a locus of connection for all the machines
of desire, a locus of sadomasochistic exercises where the artist’s joy
breaks free. Even homosexual Christs. Organs become direct powers of
the body without organs, and emit flows on it that the myriad wounds,
such as Saint Sebastian’s arrows, come to cut and cut again in such a
way as to produce other flows. Persons and organs cease to be coded
according to hierarchized collective investments; each person, each
organ has a merit all its own, and tends to its own affairs: the infant
Jesus looks from one side while the Virgin Mary listens from the other,
Jesus stands for all the desiring children, the Virgin stands for all the
desiring women, a joyous activity of profanation extends beneath this
generalized privatization. A painter such as Tintoretto paints the cre-
ation of the world like a race represented in its whole length with God
Himself on the sidelines, giving the starting signal across the track as
the figures speed away in a transversal direction. Suddenly a painting
by Lotto surges forth that could just as easily be from the nineteenth
century. (Anti-Oedipus 369; A Thousand Plateaus 178)

It is not enough to say that the 19th century is already there during
the 15th and 16th centuries, since the same could be said about the liber-
ated flows of matter that were already present when the Byzantine code
was still firmly in charge. Furthermore, these mannerist lines of flight are

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Deleuze and Mannerism 185

constantly reduced to old codes or introduced into new codes such as

linear perspective, imported from the classical aesthetics of central Italy.
As Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate with the example of oil painting
in What is Philosophy?, a change of techniques is never enough to bring
about an aesthetic revolution (192). Even if Venetian painting replaced or
transfigured the “classicism of the line” with “a creation of original rela-
tions which are substituted for the form” (Francis Bacon 158), so that the
material traits of expression in oil needed to be reworked in order to be
in resonance, it ultimately remained within an optical regime that did not
allow significant deformation (ibid.127-34). Yet these reservations don’t
alter the fact that the Venetian mannerists invented a new painting ma-
chine that directly anticipates the abstract machine of modern colorism in
which “the semiotic components are inseparable from material components
and are in exceptionally close contact with molecular levels” (A Thousand
Plateaus 334). Hence what Deleuze and Guattari say about Turner, whose
late land- and seascapes are sometimes considered “incomplete” but find
their unity in their singular “style” or “genius,” applies no less to Tintoretto
as prototypical modern artist:
It is here that art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply con-
sists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was
hidden underneath aims and objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath
recodings or axiomatics: the pure process that fulfills itself, and that
never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds – art as “experimenta-
tion.” (Anti-Oedipus 370-71, 132-33)

Conclusion: Breakthrough or Escape?

Because of their self-referentiality, both Mannerism and Modernism
have sometimes been derided as forms of Alexandrianism, made up of
artists turned inward on themselves, cut off from society, churning out
infinite variations on a withered tradition (Hocke). This seems confirmed
by Clement Greenberg’s thesis, that the purity of each art depends on the
unicity and exclusivity of its medium and on the degree to which the artist
pushes this medium to its limits. But does this material purity of art also
contain a certain material “otherness” with respect to the conventions
and intentions of any self-sufficient discipline? (De Duve 63-66). In other
words, do Mannerism and Modernism share a similar “crisis” of art?
At first sight, Deleuze seems to go one step beyond Greenberg’s
extremely problematic, medium-specific terms—which are, moreover, at
odds with the self-understanding of contemporary art. Instead of trying
to determine painting’s abstract and formal conditions of possibility, he
looks for the real conditions of artistic practice—conditions in which no
medium can be demarcated in an a priori fashion (Zepke 65). Art and

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186 Sjoerd van Tuinen

nature thus appear as diverging assemblages maintaining different rela-

tions to an abstract machine of unformed forces that constitute the vital
“community of the arts” (Francis Bacon 56). At the same time, however,
Greenberg’s notion of flatness is closely related to that of shallow depth, of
which Deleuze makes recurrent use. As Greenberg’s observations on the
continuous modern oscillation between easel and mural painting show,
the purity of the medium does not contradict the intermedial excess of
its materiality, but forms its very precondition. As we know from man-
nerist and baroque intermedial strategies, no medium is finite, because
at its limits it enters into other media, ad infinitum. The limit is the cutting
edge or point of deterritorialization, where the functional dependence
between form of content and form of expression breaks down. At the limit,
form obeys an “interlocking of differently oriented frames … The frames
and their joins hold the compounds of sensations, hold up figures, and
intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance” (What is
Philosophy? 186-87) such that “From literature to music a material thickness
is affirmed that does not allow itself to be reduced to any formal depth”
(ibid. 195).12 But whereas the Baroque constantly seeks to frame the inter-
medial tension within a homogenous representational field, Mannerism
opens up to a haptic procedure in which the deterritorializing traits of the
medium preclude the possibility of their relative reterritorialization onto
a global Gesamtkunstwerk. This is why we recognize in Mannerism rather
than the Baroque the historical precursor to modern Avant-Gardism and
its fragmentation of the arts, still accelerated by conceptual art.
Ultimately, however, for Deleuze these processes of framing and
deframing, and territorialization and deterritorialization are not only
typical of art. They mark the very “breakthrough” of the sublime rhythms
of life itself—its superior states of intensity. “We know that modern art
tends to realize these conditions: in this sense it becomes a veritable the-
atre of metamorphoses and permutations. … The work of art leaves the
domain of representation in order to become ‘experience,’ transcendental
empiricism or science of the sensible” (Difference and Repetition 56). Like
Mannerism, the modernist tendency toward abstraction is therefore not
an idiosyncratic escape from life, but rather an experiment with the inter-
stices of life itself—with the future-orientedness of sensation: “The great
and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from
life; the flight into the imaginary, or into art. On the contrary, to flee is to
produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon” (Dialogues II 36, 102).
Erasmus University, Rotterdam

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Deleuze and Mannerism 187

Notes
1. Bergson gives the example of the prefiguration of romanticism in classical writers, which
only becomes visible once romanticism has posited itself:
To take a simple example, nothing prevents us today from associat-
ing the romanticism of the nineteenth century with what was already
romantic in classical writers. But the romantic aspect of classicism is
only brought by the retroactive effect of romanticism once it has ap-
peared. If there had not been a Rousseau, a Chateaubriand, a Vigny, a
Victor Hugo, not only should we never have perceived, but also there
would never really have existed, any romanticism in the earlier classi-
cal writers, for this romanticism of theirs only materializes by lifting
out of their work a certain aspect, and this slice [découpure], with its
particular form, no more existed in classical literature before romanti-
cism appeared on the scene than there exists, in the cloud floating by,
the amusing design that an artist perceives in shaping to his fancy the
amorphous mass. Romanticism worked retroactively on classicism as
the artist’s design worked on the cloud. Retroactively it created its own
prefiguration in the past and an explanation of itself by its predeces-
sors. (Creative Mind 12)
2. In his courses on Leibniz as well as in The Fold (38) Deleuze uses the word chevaucher,
which means both ‘to grow together’ (a botanical term used for the rhizomatic effect
created when one branch grafts or implants itself on another, or for a transplantation
instead of genetic branching—one should also think of Whitehead’s concrescence) as well
as to “overlap” (such as the strata of the earth’s crust) and “to sit astride.”
3. Deleuze’s main reference on Michelangelo is Bellosi’s Michelangelo: Painting (1970), which
in turn is indebted to Roberto Longhi and Giuliano Briganti’s reassessments of Man-
nerism. According to Bellosi, ‘[t]he Doni Tondo is undoubtedly the first painting which
bears the mark of Mannerism,” foreshadowing the work of Pontormo and Bronzino,
because its strident color scheme with its effect of relief (the iridescent qualities of sheet
metal) places the painting outside the framework of serene Classicism as exemplified
by Leonardo’s immersion of figures in soft shadows (Bellosi 9, cf. Deleuze Francis Bacon,
196 n13).
4. Within the history of art, Mirollo (1984) has distinguished “stylish mannerism,” studied
by John Shearman or Robert Klein and inspired by the maniera dolce of Raphael, from
“angst mannerism” inspired by the maniera grande of Michelangelo, such as it was the
focus of, for example, Ernst Gombrich’s studies of Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Tè (1524-
1534) in Mantua or of the work of Ernst Kris.
5. This assessment is in agreement with recent Renaissance theory: “in place of naturalistic
representation, these artists [Michelangelo, Bronzino, Rosso] conceive the project of art
as one of simulation—the instillation of life into fictitious bodies, even as the animation
of dead matter (…). Above all, such artists are devoted to the production of force—the
assertive engagement of the beholder through wonder, shock (stupore) or seduction”
(Campbell 54-55).
6. Oosterling emphasizes that all media are intermedial insofar as the materiality of each
medium exceeds disciplinary boundaries such that ultimately there is a continuum of
nature and art.
7. As John Elkins writes: “Most historians of the modern and the contemporary [such
Rosalind Krauss, Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried] draw the line somewhere in the
19th century—often between David and Manet—and see anything beyond that line only
darkly. They are likely not to seek precedents for modernist practices farther back than
the mid-19th century. For others, such as Thierry De Duve or Arthur Danto, the turning
point is within the 20th century, so that plausible accounts of Modernism and Postmod-

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188 Sjoerd van Tuinen

ernism do not need to open the question of what happened in the Renaissance. Current
scholarship is Janus-faced, with the Janus mask placed somewhere between the French
Revolution and the generation of Manet. One face looks only forward, to the projects
of Modernism and Postmodernism; one looks only back, as if there were no present”
(Elkins 41-2).
8. The French médium signifies the liquid used to bind powdered color to produce paint
(What is Philosophy? 194n).
9. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze discusses “the disparity of style” (214), which disap-
pears in the repetition of an original difference instead of in the reproduction of a simple
motif: “In the repetition of a decorative motif, a figure is reproduced, while the concept
remains absolutely identical … . However, this is not how artists proceed in reality. They
do not juxtapose instances of the figure, but rather each time combine an element of one
instance with another element of a following instance. They introduce a disequilibrium
into the dynamic forces of construction, an instability, dissymmetry or gap of some kind
which disappears in the overall effects”( 20).
10. As Eric Alliez puts it, Deleuze’s work with Guattari forms a “Break, breakthrough without
which materialism remains an Idea …; without which the conceptual operations cannot
be made as physical ones” (19-20). What is compelling in this argument is that, at the same
time as Deleuze’s shift, art is also exploring the implications of the very same move from
conceptualism to energetics. This art historical moment is summed up by Lippard and
Chandler when they write: “The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroad
that may well turn out to be two roads to one place, though they appear to have come
from two sources: art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied, as sensa-
tion has been converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed
into energy and time-motion.” I owe this point to Stephen Zepke, who has ceaselessly
emphasized Deleuze & Guattari’s rejection of conceptual art in What is Philosophy?.
11. For a more in-depth inventory of these new, proto-modern traits of expression in Venetian
painting, see Zepke 129-140. For Deleuze, it was Tintoretto who pushed the Venetian
reversal of the Renaissance separation of color and light and contour to the level of
mannerist or baroque hallucination: “in place of the white chalk or plaster that primes
the canvas, Tintoretto and Caravaggio use a dark, red-brown background on which they
place the thickest shadows, and paint directly by shading towards the shadows. The
painting is transformed. Things jump out of the background, colors spring from the com-
mon base that attests to their obscure nature, figures are defined by their covering more
than their contour. Yet this is not in opposition to light; to the contrary, it is by virtue of
a new regime of light” (The Fold 31-2; Francis Bacon 128; A Thousand Plateaus 173, 301).
12. For this reason, Deleuze seems correct when he says that all difference between him
and Greenberg is merely “a quarrel over words, an ambiguity of words” (Francis Bacon
107) or that the baroque “ambition of covering the canvas with folds is discovered
again in modern art, with the all-over fold” (The Fold 123; Deleuze refers to Pollock and
Rauschenberg [ibid. 27] and to “the great modern baroque painters, from Paul Klee to
Fautrier, Dubuffet, Bettencourt …” [ibid. 35]).

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Deleuze and Mannerism 189

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