The body re-imagined: the Bizzarie di Varie Figure and performative cycles of prints in seventeenth-century Florence

Abstract

T here are images that seem to defy their place in time. The remarkable images in a collection of early seventeenth-century prints entitled Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624), seemingly disavowing their own historical contingency, present such a challenge. Turning over the fifty plates of this album is like rotating a kaleidoscope, an experience that suggests limitless possibilities. A myriad of performative figures follow one another, they are unrestrained, transgressive, without apparent order or logic. As one skims through the leaves, a carnival of actors, dancers, and fencers display not only sheer expressiveness but also transformative potential in which human, mechanical and even kinetic forces intersect and become something else. This display of the body, conceptualized in transformative, apparently limitless forms, seems inconceivable for 1624, the date etched on the album's frontispiece. Appearing to emerge rather from improvised drawing than from their physical inscription on paper as tangible matter, these etchings confound the very medium in which they appear: the figures seem to overcome their inscription on paper and float from plane to plane outside of gravity (figures 1, 2 and 3). The process of etching, which involves the use of acids to corrode the plate, is less forceful than engraving; its expressive potential allowed artists to reach a higher level of detail within the images, to achieve a wider tonal range, and to produce vibrant figures. 1These prints move towards the total undoing of the body's traditional frame, yet are anchored to a visual technology of repetition and aggregation, which asserts the body's final finished form, but also seems to constantly change it.Only two complete copies of this album are known to exist today (one in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the other in the Library of Congress in Washington), and while both copies include the same number of prints, they are in a different order, a point on which the sparse scholarly literature