Mannerism, Baroque, and Modernism: Deleuze and the Essence of Art

[...]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 impossible 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. [...]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. [...]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. 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).