Zürich Outline Plate — Massacre in Bare Contour

Read the upper third of the plate before the club it frames. Above the raised fist runs a single ruled horizontal, and below it a scatter of verticals meant to stand for an architecture, a stable, a wall; between them the copperplate has laid down nothing at all. The eye is asked to accept this vacancy as an arena. What it is, more exactly, is the standing condition of the outline series to which this sheet belongs — a reproductive economy in which tone, ground, and air are simply not undertaken, and the untouched paper does the work that a completed picture would have earned.

One concedes the line without reserve. The torsion of the central body, the abdominal division carried by contour alone, the two equine heads baring their teeth at lower left — these are laid down by a hand entirely certain of where a muscle turns and where a lip curls, and certain enough to risk no correction. It is a genuine fluency, and it deserves the word. Yet fluency of edge is not command of space, and the tradition of the ruled backdrop knows this: it cannot secure depth, cannot situate weight, cannot say where in a room a killing occurs. A Herat page would have made even its emptiness a firmament, ornament standing in for cosmos; here the blank is only blank, and the debt to a Roman relief manner supplies the postures but not the volume they require.

Later taste has been generous, reading this thrift as neoclassical austerity, as purity of intention, as the discipline of a mind too elevated for atmosphere. The sheet itself is less flattering. Note the caption cut in a fine engraved script beneath the frame line, Hercules und Diomedes — a title floating, like the figures, in paper that was never asked to become anything more. — BT