Gesture - from Botticelli to Microsoft Teams

            

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (1470s/80s)

            

       As Trinity term starts in Oxford, it is not only teaching which has moved online, but also the regular College and Faculty committee meetings which pepper the diaries of academics in this self-governing republic of scholars. Normally, we meet in groups of 20 in the high-ceilinged rooms of the History Faculty, in groups of 10 in Somerville’s SCR Dining Room, or in the full 40+ Governing Body assembly of college Fellows, in the basement hall of our 1970s’ Wolfson building. Instead, we now meet exclusively on screens. Microsoft Teams, the video-conferencing tool used by the University (and the UK House of Lords), currently shows only the faces of the four most recent speakers. The other digitally-present committee members are visible purely as tiny initials at the bottom of the screen. While online committee meetings work surprisingly well in many respects, the move from physical Oxford rooms to screens has revealed how much of a traditional meeting is conducted silently, via body language. Not all 40, 20 or 10 members of a committee will speak on every topic on the agenda, of course, but vigorous nods, discreet frowns, smiles, agitated shuffling of papers – even when only half-registered by others – together create a mood, a collective sense of a group reaction, over and above what is actually said (and minuted). At present, we cannot see our non-speaking colleagues’ mini-gestures, just rows of silent initials in coloured circles – even as we grapple with critical issues, such as the financial challenge which the pandemic urgently poses for Oxford colleges, or the implications of social distancing for teaching now and in the months to come. The ‘chat’ function, where committee members can post brief comments on the discussion in a side bar for all to see, is helpful, but it is still verbal communication; with emojis, but without gesture or human facial expressions.

                Historians have for decades studied the role and importance of gesture, particularly in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The theme of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (IMC) back in 2006, for example, was ‘Emotion and Gesture’; in 2016, Piotr Węcowski of Warsaw University published on the gestures of the Jagiellonian kings of Poland in the 15C and 16C, and their grave political meaning to contemporaries. Michael Baxandall’s celebrated book, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), argued that decoding body language in Renaissance paintings is key to understanding their meanings and composition. He pointed out, for example, that in Botticelli’s famously enigmatic Primavera, Venus’ raised hand would have been understood by (educated) contemporaries as a gesture of welcome to her spring bower. Or that the manically grinning, pointing angel seen at the foot of many Renaissance paintings is a reference to a character familiar from 15C street theatre – the festaiulo who literally pointed out which actor the viewer should be paying attention to. Late medieval preachers, meanwhile, had a repertoire of gestures, or sign language, so extensive that (some argue) a wandering Italian friar could preach through body language alone in, say, Brittany. By contrast, on Teams we communicate oblivious to most of the pointing, sighing and waving of colleagues.

 

                Having our normal professional interactions as scholars shaken up so radically by social distancing, however, can create a new space for potential historical insights and reflections. Looking at day-to-day 21C academic life, as it is turned upside down and rendered no-longer-familiar, mediated entirely through screens, might make us newly alert to elements in past cultures which we have not adequately spotted to date, and generate new research questions about society, culture and communication. Because it is not only teaching and research which are famously complementary scholarly activities; historians and anthropologists know that committee meetings, in both their traditional (tables) and novel (screens) forms, are also a crucial forum for watching, reflecting, and thinking on many levels – a surprising window, if you will, onto bigger norms and wider worlds.