W i l l i a m H o g a rt h

The Analysis of Beauty

often referred in his writings to the work

of the British painter and engraver William Hogarth, and in
particular his thematic series of paintings such as Marriage-la-mode (174345). He saw such series as a historical model for
thinking about montage in cinema as the homogeneous course of an
event [which] is broken down into distinct frames (2009, p. 197) and
then put back together in an organic construction to convey a precise meaning. Mostly, however, Eisenstein discussed Hogarths treatise The Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753, which was one of the
first works of formalist aesthetic analysis applied to art history. In
this essay Hogarth sought to elucidate the mystery of beauty and to
provide a rational definition of it, basing himself on the principles of
empiricism and the concrete observation of nature and life. As Eisenstein would do later, Hogarth wanted to define a universal principle which would make it possible to determine the effectiveness of
a work of art. He believed that beauty takes form and is expressed
to maximum effect through the use of the serpentine line, which
he called the line of beauty. For Hogarth, the line of beauty combined several essential and objective formal properties which are not
found, for example, in a straight line: congruence, variety, uniformity, symmetry, complexity, etc.
Eisenstein adopted several elements of Hogarths analysis in his
theoretical writings, particularly Organicity and Imagicity, which
was intended to form the final chapter of his unfinished book on
film directing, based on his courses at the VGIK in 193334.
For Hogarth, the force of the serpentine line lies in its dynamic
appearance, as seen in the emblem he designed for his volume, with
this famous serpentine line contained in a triangular crystal pyramid resting on a base across which is written the word variety.
Indeed Hogarths project consists in demonstrating that the art of
composing well is no more that the art of varying well (1955, p.
57). This variety and movement are irresistible and render the object of our gaze graceful in the way they satisfy the minds essential
desire to pursue something: the active mind is ever bent to be
ergei eisenstein

The Analysis of Beauty. Printed by J. Reeves for the author, London, 1753.

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Reading with Eisenstein

employed. Pursuing is the business of our lives and even abstracted

from any other view, gives pleasure. . . . This love of pursuit, merely
as pursuit, is implanted in our natures. . . . The eye has this sort of
enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts
of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed
principally of what I call the waving and serpentine lines (1955, pp.
4548).
Eisenstein, who in the 1940s began to link creative activity to
basic human urges, could not have been unaffected by such an approach. He quoted the above passage at length to explain the attraction of crime novelspursuit novels par excellencebut also more
generally with respect to any artwork which enables us to satisfy
this need of pursuit: The most interesting thing in Hogarths statement is, of course, that he sees the appearance of that same [pursuit]
instinct not only in the development of plot and intrigue but in the
development of the construction of the form in those cases when neither plot nor theme have anything in common in their content with
[pursuit] or the chase (1987, p. 268). In addition, Eisenstein could
only agree with Hogarth when the latter saw the effectiveness of the
artwork as residing in the dynamic participation of its viewers who,
through their active gaze, recreate or in fact co-create it.
Hogarth, moreover, saw the serpentine lines effectiveness and
irresistible appeal to the human eye as deriving from this lines omnipresence in the forms of nature and the human body alike. This
for Eisenstein was essential; beginning in the 1930s he had sought to
identify organic laws of composition which would imitate the laws
of nature with respect to proportion, development and growth.
Eisensteins films obey this principle: montage, through its organic rhythm, should enable the artist to make proportionate the
relation between each of the films parts (its shots and scenes) while
respecting the general unity of its sequences. Each piece is thus connected to the others not only by its visual, dynamic and narrative
aspects, but also with respect to the sequences overall emotive and
semantic dimension. And while montage observes this process of
conflictive unity between rhythm, pathos and signification in flexible ways, according to Eisenstein the correlation of its elements
tends to conform to the proportions of the logarithmic spiral (1966,
p. 300) and thus respects the principle of the serpentine lines variability. In this way, he yields to the realist aesthetic of reflecting the

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W i l l i a m H o g a rt h

world while at the same time going beyond it: it is not simply a question of imitating tangible forms, but rather of the essence of reality,
its invisible and internal structure. He thus sees in his works the
principle of reflexivity (samootobrazenie).
In addition, for Eisenstein a composition can only be described
as organic if a sole principle governs both its individual parts and the
whole. This is exactly what Hogarth wrote in The Analysis of Beauty,
and it is not at all by chance that Eisenstein quoted his remarks in
his own work: each work of art contains a permeating artistic law. Everything is constructed upon this law; this law is repeated in every detail, no
matter how trifling (2006, p. 323).
The plastic quality of the images in Eisensteins films often appears to have benefited from Hogarths lesson, particularly when the
serpentine line appears in the bodies of the films characters themselves, as it does in the shot at the end of the first part of Ivan the
Terrible (1944). Here depth of field is used to juxtapose the Tsar in
profile in the foreground with the winding crowd of people in the
background who have come to implore him to return to Moscow.
This, for Eisenstein, was by no means a merely formal technique:
because one of the properties of the serpentine line [is] the ability to
express, in images, inversion in its opposite (1966, p. 288), it also makes
it possible, using montage, to express a dialectic in operation. This
can be seen for example in the dynamic symmetries of the Odessa
steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1926) and in the procession
scene in The Old and the New (1929).
Massimo Olivero and Ada Ackerman
William Hogarth. The Analysis of Beauty, with the rejected passages from the
manuscript drafts and autobiographical notes, 1955.
Sergei Eisenstein. Lectures on Literature (n.d.), 2006.
. Organichnost i obraznost (193334), 1966.
. Le ddoublement de lUnique (1940), 2009.
. Nonindifferent Nature (1945), 1987.