Gesture

Gestures play a significant part in the arts, particularly in the performing and visual arts, as the history of these arts makes clear. In antiquity, especially in the Roman period, a particular category of theater play emerged, the pantomime. (Pantomimus meant both the play and the actor performing it.) The main characteristic of the pantomime was that it replaced the spoken text with a wide range of gestures, including dance. We know that whole tragedies were performed without the actor uttering even a single word, using instead a highly developed system of postures and gestures. In the sixth century C.E. Cassiodorus still characterizes the activity of the pantomime actor by describing his "speaking hands," his fingers that are similar to tongues, and his "loud sounding silence."

The origin of the pantomime is believed to have been the Dionysian feast in Egypt inaugurated during the rule of the Ptolemies. The multinational, and hence also multilingual, composition of society and army in the Roman Empire probably favored an art form that did not rely on a specific language and thus evaded linguistic limitations. The pantomime reached a peak of popularity in the imperial period in Rome. Pantomime actors, quite a few of whom are known to us by name, seem to have been idols of Roman society. When the emperor Augustus exiled a famous pantomime player, Pylades, from Italy, the reaction of popular audiences in the capital was so powerful that the ruler had to cancel his edict and bring the banished actor back to Rome. The pantomime as a particular genre had a long life, and in the course of centuries many fathers of the church, among them Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Minucius Felix, violently condemned such performances. In the year 305 the Church Council of Elvira decided that a pantomime actor who wanted to convert to Christianity had to give up his profession.

In the Middle Ages the pantomime did not persist as an independent genre, but the gesticulation of the actors in a medieval performance (which took place in a church or town square) was pronounced and exaggerated, often even grotesque. A good deal of the effect these plays had on their audiences was achieved by means of expressive body movement. Grotesque gesticulation plays a major part from medieval plays to performances of the commedia dell'arte. In modern times the performance based largely on body movements has had a long and eventful history. The recent inheritors of this tradition are the modern ballet and, more rarely, actual pantomime performances.

Since the time of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures, the representation of gestures in painting and sculpture has been a central means of conveying moods, ideas, and even more conceptual messages. The great artists of all centuries, especially since the Renaissance—among them Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rembrandt, and up to some works by Picasso—created classic formulations of gestural motifs that have impressed themselves profoundly on the modern cultural memory.