ABSTRACT
No study of the relationship between the different art forms in the eighteenth century can do without a discussion of the contribution of Horace Walpole – the writer, antiquarian and grand arbiter of taste in the period. Elsewhere in his correspondence, he lists his Italian "baubles", including ancient artefacts, such as tables, mosaics, urns, vases or medals, and baroque paintings by Paolo Pannini, Carlo Maratti and Pietro da Cortona, among others. While animation revives the ancient correspondences of analogical thinking between the microcosm of human artifacts and the macrocosm of universal affairs, it also reenergizes the world of polarities, the splitting of both natural and conceptual entities into oppositional pairs. The starting point is a traditional subject-object arrangement, but the paradigm of animation dissolves the pattern – the object transcends its limitations, posing a threat to the subject's dominant position.
