How to distinguish Mannerism and Baroque in Deleuze - Sjoerd van ...

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Abstract
Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philosophical concepts for
styles from art history: expressionism and 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 themselves’. 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 any systematic way. Even in The Fold. Leibniz and the
Baroque mannerism stays entirely subordinate to ‘its working relation with the baroque’.
It is only in his last course at Vincennes, in which he draws a parallel between
Michelangelo and Leibniz , 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’. My aim
is to render mannerism separable again from the baroque. This will be done by putting
attempts in art history and art criticism to give a definition of mannerism in interference
with a close-reading of key passages in Deleuze’s work, especially from The Fold and
Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. From the concept of the ‘Figure’ developed in
the latter, I will distillate an initial concept of mannerism as an art that proceeds by way
of diagrammatic deformation. Subsequently, I will 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 discover in mannerism a precursor to 20 th century modernism and in Deleuze’s
modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies.

Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism in Deleuze
Sjoerd van Tuinen, 2012, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Keywords: baroque, mannerism, modernism, spirituality, intermediality
Going by the titles of his books, Deleuze has proposed two philosophical concepts for
styles from art history: expressionism and 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 themselves’. 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 any systematic way. Even in The Fold. Leibniz and the
Baroque mannerism stays entirely subordinate to ‘its working relation with the baroque’
(Deleuze 1993: 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’ (Deleuze 12/05/1987):
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 mannerism? (CGD
07/04/1987; cf. Deleuze 1993: 33)
My aim here is to render mannerism separable again from the baroque. This will be done
by putting attempts in art history and art criticism to give a definition of mannerism in
interference with a close-reading of key passages in Deleuze’s work, especially from The
Fold and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. From the concept of the ‘Figure’
developed in the latter, I will distillate an initial concept of mannerism as an art that
proceeds by way of diagrammatic deformation. Subsequently, I will 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 discover in mannerism a precursor to 20 th century modernism
and in Deleuze’s modernist allegiance several neo-mannerist tendencies.
Preliminary Consideration on Method in Art History and Philosophy
The twentieth century has seen two major attempts to reinterpret and revalue mannerism
in terms of positive, although 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’, it solicited analogies with modernist
movements such as expressionism, which it provided with an alternative to the opposition
between academic realism and impressionistic idealism. As Erwin Panofsky
acknowledges in his classic Idea (1924),
[e]xpressionism 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 16 th century theory, paths that seek to derive the phenomenon of artistic
creativity from an extrasensory and absolute, or as we say today, cosmic principle.
(Panofsky 2008: 149)
Moreover, the expressionists recognized in mannerism a spiritual catastrophe 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, ecclesiastically, 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 1924: 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), discover 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 any ordered or formed milieu whatsoever; and mannerism with a
proto-revolutionary tendency towards abstraction, monstrosity or terribilità. Others such
as Hauser (1964) or Klaniczay (1971) put mannerism in relation to ideological
movements, which, like expressionism, are seen as stemming from the unrest of their age.
Whereas the decades around 1500 constitute a period of great hopes for harmony and
tolerance that were reflected in ideals of humanism and perfection, the 16 th century bring
to light the weaknesses of early capitalism, marked by diseases and famines caused by
urban overpopulation, 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 finds himself ‘alienated’ in a
situation of social uprooting. This situation becomes even more precarious with the
conquest of the equality between the mechanical arts and the liberal arts in defiance of
the trade guilds, as it consigns the artist to the capricious patronage of princes and 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
point of departure of Renaissance humanism, this attitude 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
differentiate it from that of the baroque. It should be emphasized, however, that this is a
methodological decision. Of course, the last decades have brought to light many
important new findings on particular figures, currents and controversies of the sixteenth
century. But no new sweeping attempts have been made to give an encompassing
definition of mannerism, such that the problem of its diverging interpretations and
evaluations has never really been solved. Instead, everything happens as if 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 impossible to abandon the notion of mannerism.
(Pinelli 1993: xxi) Because of this, my own aim is just as little to return to art historical
questions, important in themselves, of 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 2000), as if it were possible to do away with the concept
forever. But is it not of the essence of stylistic epochs that they can be scientifically
determined only retroactively, and that they possessed no more reality in that actuality
when they are said to have been actual? 1 In fact, Bredekamp’s conclusion appears as the
natural outcome of developments in art history which 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 (1977), and more recently, that of Antonio
Pinelli (1993) and Daniel Arasse & Andreas Tönnesman (1997). In each case, the inverse
correlation between the extension of the concept and its comprehension – the logical
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
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 associating 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 appeared. 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 classical 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 romanticism 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
predecessors. (CM 12)

power lies exclusively in the heterogenesis of its prehensive intension, i.e. the singular
tendencies that it brings together according to ‘the logic of the AND’ rather than of the
‘IS’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 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 ‘functives’, therefore, they posit themselves and their objects
at one and the same time. (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 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. (Deleuze & Guattari
1994: 160-1) 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’ (Deleuze 2002: 144), their internal variability or endoconsistency. This
means that philosophical concepts always correspond to a multiplicity, a system of
entangled, connected, bifurcating trajectories. (Deleuze 2002: viii) Given the
pandemonium of mutually contradicting determinations of mannerism and their various
returns in modernism, we should therefore seek systematic reconnections between them
in a new virtual order. In the end, this is not to abstract from art history but to extract a
philosophical concept from it. At stake is mannerism not as object of enquiry but as 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 possible, the question here is not what mannerism is, but what
mannerists do or how they work.
Mannerism: Rendering Visible Time
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 improve 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.’ (Michelangelo 1547, transl. Clements 1961: 16) This Neo-
Platonic reference to the intellect should not be understood in anachronistic subjectivist
terms. The maker of David cannot be abstracted from the divine spark (scintilla di dio) or
divine sign (segno di dio, Lomazzo’s anagram of disegno) that inspires him, nor can the
conceptual stage of the work of art be disconnected from its actual application in
execution. (Zuccaro 1982: Book I, ch. III & Book II, ch. VI) 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 expression or another and inseparable from
the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general.’ (Deleuze
2006: 312) Whereas in classical representation the potential idea slumbering in a given
2 In his courses on Leibniz as well as in The Fold (TF 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
Whiteheads concrescence) as well as to ‘overlap’ (such as the strata of the earth’s crust) and ‘to sit astride’
(such as on a witch’s broom).

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 2004: 137). Implicit to this understanding of mannerism as ‘manual intrusion’
(Deleuze 2004: 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 (1503-4) or the
Prigioni (1520-32) reflects the artist’s poetic virtuosity precisely insofar as it is
inseparable from the manual act that executes them. (Barolsky 1995) Hence what
mannerism reflectively discovers, in terms of Deleuze, is the idea as virtual ‘diagram’ or
‘abstract machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 496) of art: not what the artist is the author
of, but the set of asignifying and nonrepresentative signs of the material which 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 9). Initially, this is exemplified
through a mannerist painter who was deeply influenced by Michelangelo, 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 emancipation: the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure,
outside all constraint.’ (Deleuze 2004: 9) The point Deleuze makes is that, just as five
centuries later Bacon freed the canvas from the ‘natural’ regime of photographic clichés,
mannerists relieved the 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.’ (Deleuze
2004: 10) This doesn’t imply a loss of spirituality, however. Mannerism utilizes
figurative depictions in its quest to incarnate more intense spiritual presences than
classicism was capable of. 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 which is
‘not only the trace of a particular hand and its inextricable habits, but an expression of a
spiritual particularity’ (Emison 2004: 52). As Max Dvôrák famously argues in his classic
study ‘Über El Greco und den Manierismus’, it was against the backdrop of the spiritual
catastrophe in a Catholic country such as Spain – where paradoxically the Reformation
had an even bigger impact than in Northern countries, because in the latter it was bound
to public institutions whereas in Spain it released an unlimited ‘internalization’ – 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 1924: 261-75) Even if
historical mannerism is religious art par excellence, it therefore simultaneously betrays
the dominant affective and signifying regimes. ‘Christianity contains a germ of tranquil
atheism that will nurture painting; the painting can easily be indifferent to the religious
subject he is asked to represent.’ (Deleuze 2004: 124) It is precisely this mannerist

paradox of an ‘atheist spirituality’ (Ambrose 2009) 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 narration are only effects’
(Deleuze 2004: 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 Kandinsky, nor through the rejection of all form, as in Fautrier or Pollock,
but through the extraction or isolation of the ‘figural’: a ‘catastrophic’ disruption of the
link that relates sensation to an object (illustration) or that relates it to other images in a
composite whole which assigns an objective 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 161) devoid of analogy or code. What Bacon calls the brutality
of fact is an ‘event’ that is ‘made’ in a body of sensation which 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
manner in which these are brought together. (Deleuze 2004: 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: ‘[i]t 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 2004: 130-1)
Whether in the case of Bacon or in that of Michelangelo, the figural ‘matter of fact’
(Deleuze 2004: 4) is evacuated from representation by the overwhelming presence of a
visceral spirituality that unifies and animates the composition 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.’ (Deleuze 2004: 160-1, Deleuze 2006: 182)
The most striking consequence of this spiritual break with representation is
deformation, ‘deformation as an act of painting’ (Deleuze 2004: 59). Whereas classical
representation ‘takes the accident into an optical organization that makes it something
well founded (a phenomenon) or a “manifestation” of essence’ (Deleuze 2004: 126), the
ornate postures of mannerist Figures are not fixed individual forms, but deform the very
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 mannerism. 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 1970: 9, cf. Deleuze 2004:
196n13)

object form of human perception governing over sensation. Walter Friedländer puts it as
follows:
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. (Friedländer 1958: 6-8)
Deleuze himself draws on two other pupils of Wölfflin, Aloïs Riegl and Wilhelm
Worringer, who define classical representation by the aesthetic laws that force sensation
into molds 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.’ (Deleuze 2004:
125-6) In optical space, the contour line is no longer the common limit of foreground and
background on a single plane, but ‘the self-limitation of the form’ (Deleuze 2004: 125),
since it gives primacy to the foreground by subjecting it to natural forms. A ‘technical
plane of composition’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 193) projects sensation onto a wellprepared
and calm surface of which the material itself 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 ‘shallow
depth’ or an almost sculptural ‘thickness’ that simultaneously separates and intertwines
foreground and background. In Michelangelo’s sculptures, the ‘veins in marble’ (Deleuze
1993: 4) are allowed to rise to the surface. Similarly, Bacon literally wipes out perceptual
cliché’s 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 98) that reorient the
visual whole: ‘manipulated chance, as opposed to conceived or seen probabilities.’
(Deleuze 2004: 94) Starting from any ‘operative set of traits and color patches, of lines
and zones’ (Deleuze 2004: 101-2), 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.’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 194) As
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 elongation’
(Deleuze 2004: 58). In his Doni Tondo, Michelangelo thus confronts formed nature with
the unformed violence of sensation from which he extracts the Figure:
Certainly there is still an organic representation, but even more profoundly, 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 (Deleuze 2004: 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’ (Deleuze & Guattari

1987: 151). It is the body of a haptic spirituality, ‘a spirituality of the body; the spirit is
the body itself, the body without organs’ (Deleuze 2004: 47, 20-1). It is not spiritual in
the religious or even theological sense – something that is spiritual 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 lowest 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’ (Deleuze
2004: 52), each eye corresponding only to the ‘temporary and provisional presence’
(Deleuze 2004: 48) of a force, or rather, 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 1998: 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 abstraction’ of the geometric line or of the
formless. (Deleuze 2004: 48, 63-4; Deleuze 2006: 178)
The great achievement of mannerist deformation is thus 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 becoming’ (Deleuze 1986: 82; Deleuze 2004: 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.’ (Deleuze 2004: 160) If there is still an optical resemblance
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 therefore no longer preformed by
an optical model, but only the effect of a ‘variable and continuous mold’, of a manual
‘modulation’ of plastic forces. (Deleuze 2004: 97-8) For just as becoming is never an
imitation, resemblance neither has a reference nor does it lack one. (Deleuze & Guattari
1987: 237; Deleuze 1993: 95) Rather, it is always an ‘analogical expression’, ‘a
resemblance produced with accidental and non-resembling means’ (Deleuze 2004: 98,
115, 158). Wylie Sypher says nothing else when he situates Michelangelo’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.’ (Sypher 1955: 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 51) beyond all actual

figuration. It is what preserves the rhythmic unity of a sensation, i.e. 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 ….’ (Deleuze 2004: 50)
This irreducibility of style or duration to any actual figuration cannot be
emphasized enough as mannerist procedures of deformation are usually judged by art
historians in the seventeenth century pejorative sense of manierato, that is, 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.’
(Deleuze 2004: 161) From the perspective of a logic of sensation, it is precisely
classicism that is unnatural, because 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 61, 43), defined by ‘a realism of deformation, as opposed to the
idealism of transformation’ (Deleuze 2004: 130).
The Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk and its Mannerist Interstices
Deleuze opens The Fold by stating that ‘[t]he baroque refers not to an essence but rather
to an operative function, to a trait.’ (Deleuze 1993: 3) This operative 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
relation between ornament and basis itself that becomes dynamic. Firstly, 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 matterfunction
that ‘determines and materializes Form’ (Deleuze 1993: 34-8). Just like baroque
garments surround the body with their broad, distending waves without ever betraying it,
Bernini doesn’t sculpt a body covered over with a wrinkled coat, but bends a matter of
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 2008: 54-5)

variable density or texture and distils from it a body that is lost in a drapery 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 inner surfaces.’ (Deleuze 1993: 122) Secondly, this
expressive ‘autonomy of the fold’ endows the material with the capacity to become
expressive by itself and 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
‘[t]he search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of the material.’
(Deleuze 1993: 37, 122) Instead of subjective conditions or an overarching cultural code
it is therefore 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: ‘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’ (Deleuze 1993: 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 towards
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’ (Deleuze 1993: 35, translation
modified). Rather, baroque abstraction is precisely what ‘posits form as folded’, since
baroque materials cannot be worked but through the folds they already hold. The fold is
the ‘genetic element’ (Deleuze 1993: 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 which a figure can be judged complete, nor a creatio
ex nihilo, since every creation is the result of a procedure to which it stays 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
perturbating a zone of the body, the ‘free and painterly style’ of the baroque (Wölfflin)
blows, 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.’ (Deleuze 1993: 34) Just as Michelangelo played with the ‘double function’
(Rudolf Wittkower) of sculpture and architecture in the Biblioteca Laurenziana (1571) or
the Medici chapel at San Lorenzo, Bernini’s churches and palazzi are veritable
intermedial works of art 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 aberrant durations or accidental
forms that are virtually caught up in a wider, abstract movement: ‘[t]he object is
manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event.’ (Deleuze 1993: 19)
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. (Oosterling 2003)

But then how is mannerism distinguished from the baroque? In what does
mannerism’s ‘working relation (rapport opératoire) to the baroque’ (Deleuze 1993: 36-7)
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’
(Deleuze 1993: 34). Taken together, these two propositions seem to indicate that
mannerism relates to the baroque in the same way as the fold. To this must be added that
Deleuze concludes his first discussion of the baroque by writing that ‘[t]he paradigm
becomes “mannerist,” and proceeds to a formal deduction of the fold.’ (Deleuze 1993:
38) Mannerism, in other words, is an operative and paradigmatic precondition for the
baroque. Can we 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 with the fold, this doesn’t
necessarily go for 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 16 th -
century Italy. The Byzantine painting of light subsists in the fluid chiaroscuro of the
Venetian mannerists, especially Tintoretto, whereas the violence of the Gothic line is a
common trait of the Dürer-inspired mannerism 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 that were reflected in ideals of humanism and perfection, the 16 th century
brought to light the weaknesses of early capitalism. Following Hauser and Klaniczay, to
whom Deleuze refers in The Fold (Deleuze 1993: 151n18), both mannerism and baroque
mirror the spiritual, material and intellectual crises that brought about the decline of the
Renaissance. They constitute a ‘crisis of property’ (Deleuze 1993: 110), ‘a crisis and
collapse of all theological Reason’ and a ‘psychotic episode’ (Deleuze 1993: 67-8). 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’
(Deleuze 1993: 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’ (Wölfflin 1964: 19).
According to Klaniczay, there is a strong heretic tendency in mannerism which 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
tendencies 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 figurative spectacle. (Sypher 1955: 183-5, 34) In a
similar fashion, what Deleuze recognizes in Leibniz is the ultimate attempt to come to
terms with a mannerist world and save Aristotelian hylomorphism. If the paradigm is
mannerist, then ‘the extreme specificity of the baroque’ (Deleuze 1993: 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 different 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 framing 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, 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 organize masses, masses that
follow an extrinsic vector of gravity or of the greatest incline’ (Deleuze 1993: 102)), and
by framing the infinity of space within hermetic, or monadic, enclosures. (Cf. Sypher
1955: 185-211; Deleuze 1993: 28) The baroque thus forms the basis of a ‘concertation’ of
matter which functions like an ‘ideal causality’ (Deleuze 1993: 133-4), a musical
ordering of folds all the way into the metaphysical domain of essential forms or eternal
spirit-souls which extract from the physical world a ‘higher unity to which the other arts
are moving as so many melodic lines’ (Deleuze 1993: 128). This is why Leibniz’ monads
have ‘special hooks’ – so-called vincoli – attached to them over which the infinite fold of
the baroque is distributed, such that the danger of a radicalized mannerism, of truly
immanent styles or essences – whose philosophical father is perhaps Spinoza rather than
Leibniz – is averted.
Deleuze sees this compromise between the collapse of form in the pleats of matter
and the ascension of spirit exemplified in two paintings that mark the transition of
mannerism into baroque: Tintoretto’s Last Judgment (1586-8) and El Greco’s The Burial
of Count Orgaz, each of which is divided by an infinitely folded horizontal line which
unites the heavy bodies pressed against each other below with the rising soul above.
(Deleuze 1993: 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 9) –, this appearance is founded as such
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.’
(Deleuze 1993: 35, 125) In terms of Leibniz, this is the presence of reasonable souls who
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.’ (Deleuze 1993: 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 of
a more pious, baroque spirituality: ‘It is with God that everything is permitted’ and,
indeed, that ‘[e]verything is made to pass through the code’ (Deleuze 2004: 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 possible worlds). (Deleuze

1993: 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.’ (Deleuze 1993: 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,
Soul and of God.
In sum, if mannerism expresses the immanent yet relative deterritorialization of
well-founded forms, the baroque 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 such as it already
exists, although virtually, as infinite totality, even if ‘in respect to new principles capable
of justifying it’ (Deleuze 1993: 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.’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 6) After the total aestheticization of politics and
the total politicization 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
For a long time, it has not been very fashionable to search for the roots of the
contemporary before the French Revolution. 7 Recently, however, many have argued that
the return of the baroque is the sign of our time. The concept of neo-baroque would
provide a more concrete content to our historical period than the more ideological
concept of postmodernism. This was perhaps also 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.’ (Deleuze 1993: 136) By contrast, the more scarce
attempts to give a contemporary revalidation of the concept of mannerism are usually
based on the assumption that postmodernism relates to modernism as mannerism to
7 As John Elkins writes: ‘Most historians of the modern and the contemporary [such Rosalind Krauss,
Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried -svt] draw the line somewhere in the nineteenth 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-nineteenth century. For others, such as Thierry De Duve
or Arthur Danto, the turning point is within the twentieth century, so that plausible accounts of modernism
and postmodernism 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 project of modernism and postmodernism: and
one looks only back, as if there were no present.’ (Elkins 2008: 41-2)

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
16 th 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, 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 etcetera. (Venturi & Scott Brown 2004: esp. 73-
104 and 212-7; cf. Massumi 2002) Yet these parallels between postmodernism and
mannerism seem to be 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 to be more closely related to modernism’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
figurative while mannerism is refined, elitist, avantgardist, intellectual, and abstract. We
might therefore as well argue that the baroque relates to mannerism as postmodernism to
modernism. Perhaps it is for similar reasons that Deleuze too rejects the postmodern, a
rejection of the ‘post-‘ in favour of the new? (Bogue 2004: 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 concept
of ‘modernism’. What remains to be seen is to what extent mannerism could be the
untimely contemporary of this concept.
Besides Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, there are several occasions on
which Deleuze approaches modern art from a mannerist perspective. The earliest is the
chapter on ‘Essences and the Signs of Art’ in Proust and Signs (1964/1970), which
appears to be deeply inspired by the Neo-Platonism and hermeticism of 16 th 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 Deleuze 1973: 42). As Deleuze explains, art is able to render present other
possible worlds within ‘everyday life’ (Deleuze 2001: 293) because it turns any medium
into a ‘refracting material’, rendering it ‘ductile’ and thus ‘spiritualizing’ it. 8 (Deleuze
1973: 46-8) In art neither the spectator or artist is the foundation of the way the world
looks to us, nor is it the material of the work of art 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’. (Deleuze 1973: 41-4) 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, precisely to the extent that it eludes all
natural or empirical determinations, is based on the very unity or complex identity of idea
and style. Through the materials they work with, artists bring together different objects in
8 The French médium signifies the liquid used to bind powdered color to produce paint. (Deleuze &
Guattari 1994: 194n)

order to confer upon them a common incorporeal quality without ever confusing these
objects with the quality itself, which stays forever indeterminate. 9 Accordingly, the
yellow in Vermeer’s View of Delft is said to be one of these ‘necessary lenses of a
beautiful style’ (Deleuze 2006: 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’ (Deleuze 2004: 138; Deleuze 1973: 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 ‘[n]ature or life, still too heavy, have
found in art their spiritual equivalent’ (Deleuze 1973: 137-8). 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’ (Deleuze 1973: 47-9), without
ever being reducible to the subjects or materials 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 percepts can be constructed only in art, since they belong
to the presence of an accidental or unnatural eye that, instead of being transcendentally
fixed, derives its consistency entirely from the transversal manner in which it is
produced, i.e. from ‘the formal structure of the work of art, insofar as it does not refer to
anything else, which can serve as unity – afterwards’ (Deleuze 1973: 149). 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.’ (de Tolnay 1964: 85-6) 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 Deleuze 1973: 41)
Deleuze’s Proustian identity of manner and idea also brings us back to the
question of the division of labor between the eye or intellect as faculty of conception and
the hand as the faculty of execution. In mannerism, the transcendental organization of
anthropocentric space in terms of illustration and narration is not just given up either in
favour of a liberation of the eye and a repression of all tactility as in Byzantine art, or in
favour of a liberation of the hand and a repression of all opticality as in Gothic art, but
subjected to an experimental variation of diagrammatic features which no longer allows
for a hand-eye subordination in either direction. It follows that if artistic ideas are
incorporeal, this does not mean that they transcend the corporeal process of their
realization. They rather 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
9 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze therefore discusses ‘the disparity of style’ (Deleuze 2001: 214),
which disappears 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.’ (Deleuze 2001: 20)

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 replace it with the ‘modern’
conjunction of force-matter in which each form is only a temporary fold of matterenergy.
This shift coincides with what is often interpreted as a move away from
Deleuze’s early structuralist conception of the ontogenesis of the work of art on 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?
(Deleuze 1993: 35)
Yet even if a more energetic than ideal relation appears between diagram and
sensation, the task of art remains to have a ‘limitless corporeality’ become expressive of
an ‘incorporeal power’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 109). For matter, according to
Deleuze, is only a solidified or frozen spirit, while spirit is 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’
(Deleuze 1973: 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.’ (Deleuze &
Guattari 1987: 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
mannerism, a reproduction of its actual procedures and ideas. Rather, modernism reeffectuates
mannerism, sharing with its own means in a mannerist intensity or
constellation of forces, and by this very act also counter-actualizes the image of historical
mannerism we already have.
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 painting (Bellini, Giorgione, Titian), which attained ‘its own
grandeur, its own genius’ when Venetian commodity capitalism, largely based on
intensive trade with Constantinople, began to decline toward the middle of the fifteenth
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
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’
(Alliez 2003: 19-20). What is compelling in this argument is that, at the same time of 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 sensation has been
converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion.’
(1968) I owe this point to Stephen Zepke, who has ceaselessly emphasized Deleuze & Guattari’s rejection
of conceptual art in What is Philosophy?.

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 simultaneously affirming rather than negating 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 1526-9), 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 creation 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.
(Deleuze & Guattari 2003: 369; Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 178)
Now of course it is not enough to say that the nineteenth century is already there during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, since the same could already be said about the
liberated flows of matter that were already present when the Byzantine code was still
firmly in charge. Furthermore, these mannerist lines of flight are constantly reduced to
old codes or introduced into new codes such as linear perspective, imported from the
regime of 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
11 For a more in-depth inventory of these new, proto-modern traits of expression in Venetian painting, see
Zepke 2005, 129-40. 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 common 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.’ (Deleuze 1993: 31-2; Deleuze 2004: 128;
Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 173, 301)

enough to bring about an aesthetic revolution. (Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 192) In fact,
even if Venetian painting replaced or transfigured the ‘classicism of the line’ with ‘a
creation of original relations which are substituted for the form’ (Deleuze 2004: 158),
such that the material traits of expression of oil need to be ‘reworked’ step by step
according to a certain manner that puts them in resonance, it ultimately remained within
an optical regime that did not allow for significant processes of deformation. (Deleuze
2004: 127-34) Yet these reservations don’t alter the fact that the Venetian mannerists
invented a new painting machine 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’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:
334). Hence what Deleuze and Guattari say about Turner, whose late land- and seascapes
are sometimes considered as ‘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 consists 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
“experimentation.” (Deleuze & Guattari 2003: 370-1, 132-3)
Conclusion: Breakthrough or Escape?
Because of their self-referentiality, both mannerism and modernism have often been
derided as forms of Alexandrianism: the artists would turn in on themselves, forming a
caste of clerics cut off from society, churning out infinite variations on a withered
tradition. (Hocke 1957) This seems to be confirmed by the thesis of Clement Greenberg
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 perhaps we should wonder
whether this material purity of art does not also contain a certain material ‘otherness’
precisely with respect to the sectarian conventions and intentions of any self-sufficient
discipline? (De Duve 2010: 63-6) In other words, whether mannerism and modernism
share a similar ‘crisis’ of art?
At first sight, Deleuze seems to go one step beyond Greenberg’s historically
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 2010:
65) Art and nature thus appear as diverging assemblages maintaining different relations
to an abstract machine of unformed forces that constitute the vital ‘community of the arts’
(Deleuze 2004: 56). At the same time, however, Greenberg’s notion of flatness is all but
opposed to what Deleuze refers to with the Greenbergian concept of shallow depth. On
the contrary: 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
mannerist 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’ (Deleuze & Guattari
1994: 186-7) such that ‘[f]rom literature to music a material thickness is affirmed that
does not allow itself to be reduced to any formal depth.’ 12 (Deleuze & Guattari 1994:
195) But whereas the baroque constantly seeks to frame the intermedial 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
territorialisation and deterritorialization are not only typical of art. They mark the very
‘breakthrough’ of the sublime rhythms of life itself, i.e. its superior states of intensity.
‘We know that modern art tends to realize these conditions: in this sense it becomes a
veritable theatre 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.’ (Deleuze 2001: 56) Like mannerism, the modernist tendency
towards abstraction is therefore not an idiosyncratic escape from life, but rather an
experiment with the interstices of life itself, i.e. 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’ (Deleuze 2002: 36, 102).
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