6PROLOGUEpractice regime. They were both part of highly competitive environments
defined by strict aesthetic standards, and both would see their career end
prematurely with nothing else lined up for them thereafter. Both balleri-
nas and horses were in a sense the product of different but related unfor-
giving entertainment industries that similarly objectified human and
animal bodies and then discarded them after use. Degas’s images of horses
and ballerinas in training thus bear a darker edge, one gesturing to the
emerging capitalist economies of consumption and the vulnerability it im-
posed on its objects. The dark edge of training, whether of a ballerina or a
racehorse, practically and metaphorically incorporated economies of do-
mestication. Discipline was at the core of both training processes. Struc-
tures of power instilled submission in both horses and ballerinas. Methods
of training were capable of “breaking the spirits” to accomplish the classical
standard or create the ideal specimen, on stage as well as at the track.
This dark edge was exemplified in Little Dancer not simply through an
emphasis on context—pushing unwanted sights into the view of bour-
geois socialites had already been successfully accomplished by Courbet
and Manet. But Degas’s sculpture made matters far more uncomfortable
by leveraging upon an unprecedented conception of materiality. The aes-
thetic essence of classical sculpture lay in a form of transubstantiation, ac-
cording to which the varied materialities of objects should be synthesized
into one by the dexterity of the artist. Flesh, hair, fur, horns, and so forth
were all assimilated into the materiality of one medium, be it bronze, marble,
or oil painting. The work of mimesis, which characterized neoclassical
sculpture, always aimed at producing aesthetic models of perfection based
on the Platonic ideal. Thus, classical sculpture situated itself as close as
possible to optical visuality while simultaneously denying its realist ambi-
tion in favor of pure idealization. Nature must be perfected, Ingres advised
Degas—“Young man, never work from nature. Always draw from memory
or from engraving the masters,” he said.^5 But, paradoxically, the frail-
looking young Little Dancer was invested with the task of single-handedly
assaulting the very tradition of classical sculpture by transgressing this
most important rule on both accounts: form and matter.
But many might not be aware that the Little Dancer we have become
used to encountering in museums around the world is not the original
displayed by Degas in 1881.^6 Cast bronze multiples were authorized by
Degas’s descendants in the 1920s and have become more recognizable than