Madame Pontormo in leather. Pathosformeln, “citazione deviata” ed ermeneutica sadomasochista nella storia dell’arte secondo Corrado Levi

The article profiles Corrado Levi – architect, artist, critic, and gay activist – during the 1970s. Levi evolved from revolutionary Marxist convictions in the early 1970s to embracing the liberating and creative potential of alienation in capitalist affluent societies by the end of the decade. The essay examines how Levi utilized examples from art history, including Dadaism and Jacopo Pontormo, to articulate a politics of the image for queer subjects. Through theoretical reflection and the practical experience of sadomasochistic eroticism, Levi contributed to a visual atlas suggesting the existence of queer desires and potentialities in Western art history. By finding expressive similarities between Pontormo’s drawings and Tom of Finland’s leather imagery, Levi challenged the linearity of historicism and the emotional neutrality of formalism and philology. He proposed an “empathetic” and affective historiography capable of capturing the perpetuation of Pathosformeln through time. This historiography retrieves, from an LGBTQ perspective, both the historical lessons of Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft and Achille Bonito Oliva’s notion of “deviant citation.”