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 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).

Skin

“…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.…”

Classifying the body in Marlene Dumas'The Image as Burden

“…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.…”

Skin, Clothing, and Dwelling

“…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.…”