one more:
A reference to Bernini reveals an anti-Baroque sensibility and implicates Mannerism--with its stylized gestural drama--as the negation of physical beauty...Moliere's "would-be gentleman" cannot adopt with ease the norms of the aristocratic milieau to which he aspires. His attempts to fence, sing, dance, pay compliments, even philosophize, are overtly mechanical. This automatism, which renders him ridiculous for all to see, illustrates Bergson's understanding of the comical, characterized as "Something mechanical encrusted on the living." Bergson offers marionettes as an example of this "deflection of life towards the mechanical." When of these puppets he observes that "the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze," his words echo the anecdote on which Kleist's piece turns. A youth, noted for his own lithe beauty, inadvertently glimpses himself in a mirror while toweling off in a public bath. He calls attention to the pose, in which he discerns a likeness to a famous marble figure of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. The speaker, though he has also noticed the similarity, declines to validate the boy's vanity; mockingly, and with words that expose the imaginary wholeness of the body as phantasmatic, he accuses his young friend of seeing ghosts ("er sahe wohl Geister"). The boy tries in vain to duplicate the pose, the grace of which dissolves in the instant of becoming self-aware. Repeated with increasing frustration, the gesture acquires "a comical element" ("ein komisches Element").
A reference to Bernini reveals an anti-Baroque sensibility and implicates Mannerism--with its stylized gestural drama--as the negation of physical beauty...Moliere's "would-be gentleman" cannot adopt with ease the norms of the aristocratic milieau to which he aspires. His attempts to fence, sing, dance, pay compliments, even philosophize, are overtly mechanical. This automatism, which renders him ridiculous for all to see, illustrates Bergson's understanding of the comical, characterized as "Something mechanical encrusted on the living." Bergson offers marionettes as an example of this "deflection of life towards the mechanical." When of these puppets he observes that "the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze," his words echo the anecdote on which Kleist's piece turns. A youth, noted for his own lithe beauty, inadvertently glimpses himself in a mirror while toweling off in a public bath. He calls attention to the pose, in which he discerns a likeness to a famous marble figure of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. The speaker, though he has also noticed the similarity, declines to validate the boy's vanity; mockingly, and with words that expose the imaginary wholeness of the body as phantasmatic, he accuses his young friend of seeing ghosts ("er sahe wohl Geister"). The boy tries in vain to duplicate the pose, the grace of which dissolves in the instant of becoming self-aware. Repeated with increasing frustration, the gesture acquires "a comical element" ("ein komisches Element").