Skin colour

Abstract

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.

Skin Studies

“…Curtin, 2003; Schneider, 2014); fine arts (e.g. Fend, 2017); French literature (e.g. Kay, 2006; Walter, 2013) and history (Chaney, 2017) that may well interest readers of this issue.…”

Skin and Scars

“…In the second act of the film, the audience ‘knows’ that her addiction has progressed because her hair is messy and her skin is now make-up free and there are visible blemishes or scars on her chin. Mechthild Fend, one of the few art historians currently working on skin, states: ‘The face’s potential to signify has often led to the metaphoric association with canvas and paintings – both face and canvas are surfaces on which colour and line work and produce meaning’ (Fend, 2017: 5). In representations of female addicts, dirty skin and blemished faces signify not only addiction but also failed or deviant femininity.…”

“…Mechthild Fend (2017: 10) argues that from the late 18th century onwards, there was a:new focus on the surface and the borderlines of the body and a new understanding of the skin as physical demarcation of the self…. [The] word ‘skin’ rather than ‘flesh’ is used with increasing frequency when referring to the surface or substance an artist imitates when painting the naked parts of a human body.…”

“…(Kane, 1881: 171)Kane identifies three different kinds of media in this passage: the cut (the engraving or print), the photograph (which is not included in the text but which would have signified empirical evidence in the medical context at this time), and the skin itself. In alluding to the woman’s skin as looking as though it had been pricked all over with India ink, Kane is on the one hand evoking the image of tattooed skin (which is, significantly, mentioned as one form of ‘physical stigmata’ in the New York Narcotic Clinic’s 1920 statement), and on the other, he imagines skin as paper, a material and discursive link that has a long history, according to Fend (2017: 9). Fend observes that the subcutaneous zone was ‘an eighteenth-century neologism’ (2017: 85).…”

“…In alluding to the woman’s skin as looking as though it had been pricked all over with India ink, Kane is on the one hand evoking the image of tattooed skin (which is, significantly, mentioned as one form of ‘physical stigmata’ in the New York Narcotic Clinic’s 1920 statement), and on the other, he imagines skin as paper, a material and discursive link that has a long history, according to Fend (2017: 9). Fend observes that the subcutaneous zone was ‘an eighteenth-century neologism’ (2017: 85). In employing the term ‘subcutaneous’ in the title of the cut, the author also evoked the image or concept of the (invisible) inside of the body, even while representing (only) the outside surface, namely, the top layer of the skin.…”