The joint-architecture of the char

In his aesthetic treatise of 1753, The analysis of beauty, artist William Hogarth observes that machines, unlike living beings, became less beautiful as they became more complicated in their range of motion (Hogarth 1997: 62–63). Hogarth’s comparison of mechanical devices and living bodies parodies a prevailing mechanist philosophy that understood movement not in terms of self-propulsion or volition, but as the effect of an eternal mover. Within a mechanist framework, the beauty of life-forms resided in their essentialized and idealized proportions, especially the latter’s correspondence with the orderly, harmonious structure attributed to the universe. For Hogarth, such a conception of beauty drove connoisseurs’ obsession with the proportions of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture in his time. Exclaiming that only a lifelessness inhered in such static proportions, Hogarth instead offers the example of the immeasurable circumference of an arm that changes as its muscles flex and relax (Hogarth 1997: 62–63). It is this pulsating life-force that Hogarth renders as the exemplarily beautiful form of the coiling s-curve or “serpentine” line whose twists and turns in space do not represent the knowable essence of a matter’s substance but rather an organism’s indeterminate and variable, indeed slithering, formation in movement. His example of the arm also describes with simplicity the challenge at the heart of his artistic practice: the rendering of figures in formative movement in a static medium such as engraving.