Gesture in Naples and Thought on Gesture from the Ancient to the Modern Age

Elenio Cicchini

The notion of gesture is marked by a paradox: the more it is used, the more controversial its meaning becomes. In our time, gesture is mostly spoken of in relation to performance. But gesture is genetically related to painting, both in the practical sense (in the figure depicted and in the painter’s movements) and in its ancient and modern definition. If for the Greeks gesture designated an attitude of the body that painting was tasked with communicating, it is significant that Roger Bacon associated gesture not with the alphabetic language but with the pictogram. Moreover, modern scholars have suffered a degree of embarrassment when it comes to the question of the temporality of gestures. Humanists discussed the gestures described by ancient authors as if they were still present, while Diderot and Condillac regarded them as a form of natural expression that is not subject to learning. The problematic nature of the temporality of gestures became explicit in the nineteenth century, when Andrea de Jorio published the book Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano in 1832. De Jorio was the first archaeologist from Naples to catalogue the Greek and Roman finds from Herculaneum and Pompeii. His approach was groundbreaking: he compared the gestures of ancient figures painted on vases with those of contemporary Neapolitan genre painting. Two figures belonging to different contexts, separated in time by two millennia, were freed from all diachronic presuppositions in the name of gesture. The figures were thus de-archeologised and brought to life. Almost a century later, Aby Warburg would rethink the birth of Renaissance painting through the category of the gesture as a legacy of antiquity. Pollaiolo and Donatello ‘intensified’ ancient gestures in an attempt to reduce temporal distance. 
How has gesture been conceived over the centuries? Why has our philosophical, artistic and linguistic tradition thought of gesture as a sign? How does gesture differ from posture? Why do de Jorio and Warburg’s reflections on gesture lead to a meditation on the temporal status of images? What is the peculiarity of the Neapolitan gestures? 
The project aims to answer these questions, in large part by paying particular attention to the production techniques of figurative gestures.