A note on Hogarth’s serpentine beauty. Geometry and hermeneutics, intelligence and eroticism

This contribution tells the story of a longstanding aesthetic affair between intelligence and eroticism, born in the London of the mid- 1750s. It took the happy shape of a sinuous line and the rendez-vous was chaperoned by William Hogarth’s pioneering Analysis of Beauty, published in December 1753. Hogarth’s discourse provides a groundbreaking definition of serpentine morphology, which emerges as his book theorizes that beauty is found in the pursuit of intricacy of form and is both graphically and conceptually embodied in the winding line, also referred to as ‘the line of beauty and grace’. The beautiful is thus the offspring of an interaction – or of an amorous liaison – between the strategic intricacy of serpentine lines (corresponding to an ontology of beauty) and the seductive, erotically oriented entanglement that links serpentines
to their beholders. These last yield a hermeneutics of beauty – the subjective, emotional component of its interpretation. It is then the theoretical task and the legacy of Hogarth’s Analysis sumptuously to affirm and celebrate the union of geometry and hermeneutics, as well as the coming together of intelligence and eroticism, and it does so through its detailed, passionate praise of waving, winding, zigzagging and meandering patterns.