Abstract
Despite being reproduced on the t-shirts, coasters, cups, travel mugs, blankets, or handbags, Leonardo's Leda, Botticelli's three Graces, or Giambologna's bathing Venus could hardly talk about followers until they have begun to sail the seven seas of Instagram. Top ten website's stars like Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, or Beyoncé, followed by the hundreds of thousands of girls and women around the globe, they all avidly draw on the renaissance invention of "figura serpentinata" and curve their bodies accordingly in the countless pool, sea, or bathroom selfies. As if the dream of Balzac's famous "Unknown Masterpiece" came true and while "looking for a picture, [we stood] before a woman." The question is: what happened to the heritage of the serpentine figure that the Instagram selfies keep on exploiting?
The paper will pick up the threads of the already published research ("Figura Serpentinata Unleashed: Hogarth's Line of Beauty and the Misreading of Lomazzo's Treatise," in Umění/Art, LXV/5-6, 2018) and explicate the genealogy of the "Instagram Venuses," leading from Hogarth's repolarization of the renaissance concept through the 19th and 20th-century embrace of the "liberated" line to the specific contemporary inversion of the mind-body dualism that has mingled with the artistic tradition.
The trick is that the original "figura serpentinata", readily compatible and symbiotic with the renaissance Neoplatonic thought, presented the spiritual trajectory of the erotic animation, culminating in the desired transcendence. Most importantly, such trajectory was read as the specific seizure that dematerializes bodies and makes them transparent. However, after the disposal of the Neoplatonic background and the loosely yet demonstrably related 19th-century hygienic translations, the up-to-date epigone of the "figura serpentinata" turned into a folded line, becoming a surface seismograph of the internal bodily passions promised to expose themselves behind the scenes or the closed doors of the "paid areas," as in the case of the new phenomenon of "OnlyFans."
To sum it up in just one sentence, while the original "figura serpentinata" served as the philosophically enriched safeguard preventing the erotic contour from becoming openly sexual and orgiastic, the contemporary selfie-line blossoms as the visual vocabulary of lust.