L’oeuvre en mouvement. De l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle

The twenty-two articles collected here explore the theme of movement in a variety of works, including the literary, visual and musical, spanning from the antique period through the eighteenth century. The collection opens with an examination of the notion of rythmos – understood as time, form or measure – from a historical and philosophical perspective. The study is then divided into three sections: the first, “Figures of Movement”, focuses on forms of movement found in medieval texts, inscribed in the Romanesque portals of Aquitaine, depicted in Flemish images of the Annunciation and baroque visions of ecstasy, or engraved in objects related to daily life, such as crockery or commemorative coins. The second section, “Objects in Motion”, addresses questions of materiality, examining diverse sources, from the circulation of perfumes in the antique period to a variety of medieval devotional objects, such as the mechanisms that powered the “holy marionettes” of Christ and related theatrical machinery, as well as the functioning of both sacred and profane processions in Italy and the Franco-Burgundian region. Finally, in the section entitled “Corporeal Movement”, the gestures associated with music and dance are described and analysed in sources spanning from Etruscan iconography through Latin rondeaux to acrobats and dancers found on Romanesque capitals and in texts about holy women. Movement is thus shown to be one of the fullest means of expression in a work of art, whether in the form of text, image, sculpture, mechanism or monument.