This chapter shows that the notion of skin colour emerged only gradually since the sixteenth century and became a prominent marker of race in conjunction with the development of racial anthropology during the Enlightenment. The colour of a person used to be perceived as body colour and often referred to as complexion, a term linked to the ancient medical theory of the four humours and temperaments. The artistic making and mixing of flesh tones was closely linked to humoral theory. By the eighteenth century most anatomist interested in the microscopic structure of skin agreed that the body's colouring matter – later called pigment – resides in an outer layer of the skin. This was demonstrated in an early medical illustration by Jan Admiral made for a Bernard Albinus‘ anatomical treatise on the colour of the skin. Interestingly, the print also uses a new technique of colour printing, and the argument is that skin colour is simultaneously an artistic, technical and medical problem in this colour mezzotint. Finally, an analysis of Girodet's Portrait of Belley and Benoist's Portrait d'une negresse suggests that skin colour is both a political and representational problem in these portraits painted shortly after the French Revolution.

This essay argues for the shared quality of skin and painting as signifying surfaces. When representing the surface of the body the artist engages with questions about the borders of the body and relations between the interior and the exterior. Portraits by Jacques‐Louis David and Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres are considered in relation to several discursive fields: medical definitions of skin from the Enlightenment, nineteenth‐century artistic anatomy and art theory. While David's rendering of skin is understood in terms of Xavier Bichat's definition of skin as a ‘limite sensitive’, the hermetically sealed and opaque skin of Ingres's figures negates contemporary notions of skin as a communicative membrane. Scientific knowledge notwithstanding, these very different approaches to the representation of skin may be seen as reflecting upon different ways to produce meaning as well as different conceptions of the body. Mechthild Fend is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she is working on a project on the history and representation of skin in late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century France. Her recent books deal with the representation of masculinity: Männlichkeit im Blick. Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der Frühen Neuzeit (co‐edited with Marianne Koos, Cologne, 2004), and Grenzen der Männlichkeit. Der Androgyn in der französischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie Zwischen Aufkl.arung und Restauration (Berlin, 2003).

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