2005
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2005.00466.x
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Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1790–1860

Abstract: 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 underst… Show more

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Cited by 13 publications
(5 citation statements)
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“…Mechthild Fend notes that "certain terms became more prominent in medical discourse around 1800, among them the word 'surface'." 8 Fend suggests this is due to greater attention being paid to the visual appearance of the body, as well as the growing specialism of dermatology and its conception of the skin as an indicator of other things. Nineteenth-century illustrations of skin conditions and their sufferers often portrayed these conditions with reference to the whole patient, carrying within them markers of social identity.…”
Section: Fragments Of Asylum Practicementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Mechthild Fend notes that "certain terms became more prominent in medical discourse around 1800, among them the word 'surface'." 8 Fend suggests this is due to greater attention being paid to the visual appearance of the body, as well as the growing specialism of dermatology and its conception of the skin as an indicator of other things. Nineteenth-century illustrations of skin conditions and their sufferers often portrayed these conditions with reference to the whole patient, carrying within them markers of social identity.…”
Section: Fragments Of Asylum Practicementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Fend discusses how the whiteness of the women in Ingres' portraits is ‘obviously a sign of racial and social distinction’, while demonstrating that the discourses of French art theory and racial anthropology became ‘colour conscious’ simultaneously, ‘as signalled by the superiority accorded white skin as the universal ideal and standard of beauty’ 57. Rosenthal goes further to argue that ‘white(ness) as a visually racial category emerged as an explicit value in the eighteenth century … [and] whiteness became preeminently visual through a particular physiological capability perceived as a feminine “virtue”: fair women's capacity to blush’ 58.…”
Section: Using Titles To Classifymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…10 Buchner and his contemporaries regarded the skin as a regulating and protective barrier against the atmosphere. 12 As Claudia Benthien has shown, the skin gained semantic meaning that expressed health, disease, and inner character. 13 Physiology shaped nineteenth-century hygienists' conception of the skin as an interface.…”
Section: Hygiene Physiology and The Skinmentioning
confidence: 99%