Table Of ContentFleshing out surfaces considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and
medical discourse in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century France. It describes F
a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period and argues le
that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the s Fleshing out surfaces
same. Initially understood in terms of the body’s substance, of flesh tones and h
body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. in
g
Skin is the most significant surface for artistic imitation and flesh has often Skin in French art and medicine,
o
been described as a privileged site of life and lifelikeness. Skin and flesh
u
entertain complex metaphorical relationships with artefacts, images and 1650–1850
t
image making: fabricated surfaces are often described as skins, skin and
s
colour have a longstanding connection and paint is frequently associated with u
flesh. This book traces the shift in the terminology of art theory and in the r
practices of painting, as well as engraving, colour printing and drawing. Each fa Mechthild Fend
chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones c
via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking e
in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the s
focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing and theorising
painterly skills and a site where the body and the image made of it become
equally expressive.
Fleshing out surfaces is essential reading for scholars and students of art history,
visual culture, the medical humanities, the history of science and French
history.
Mechthild Fend is Reader in History of Art at University College London F
e
n
d
Cover image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of a
Woman (formerly identified as Marie-Madeleine
Guimard), c.1769–70, oil on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm,
Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais
(Musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda) ISBN 978-0-7190-8796-7
9 780719 087967
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Fleshing out surfaces
series editors
Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon
Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic
structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation
and geographical subfields of t raditional art history, and addressing a wide range
of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
These books will acknowledge the impact of recent s cholarship on our
understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged
through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic
movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.
Also available in the series
Art, museums and touch Fiona Candlin
The ‘do-it-yourself’ artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics
Anna Dezeuze (ed.)
The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture Helen Hills
The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris
Mary Hunter
Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture Dominic Johnson
Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds)
After the event: New perspectives in art history Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds)
Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil Luciana Martins
Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience
Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds)
Flesh cinema. The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film Ara Osterweil
After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation
in the virtual feminist museum Griselda Pollock
Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image
and early modern travel Rose Marie San Juan
The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England
Kimberley Skelton
The newspaper clipping: a modern paper object Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz
Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art Tamara Trodd (ed.)
Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts Caroline Turner and Jen Webb
Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean Leon Wainwright
Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art
Mechtild Widrich
Fleshing out surfaces
Skin in French art and medicine, 1650–1850
Mechthild Fend
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Mechthild Fend 2017
The right of Mechthild Fend to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester m1 7ja
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
isbn 978 0 7190 8796 7 hardback
First published 2017
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Typeset in Minion with Myriad display
by Koinonia, Manchester
Contents
List of illustrations page vii
Acknowledgments xv
1
Introduction 1
2
The surface’s substance 17
3
Nervous canvas 65
4
Sensitive limit 107
5
Skin colour 143
6
Seeing through the skin 193
7
Hermetic borderline 237
8
Epilogue: segregation 274
Select bibliography 281
Index 304
Illustrations
Plates
The plates can be found between pages xvi and 1
11 Florent de La Mare-Richart, Noël Coypel père (detail: palette and
brushes), 1677, oil on canvas, 117 x 98 cm, Châteaux de Versailles
et de Trianon. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Chateau de
Versailles) / Gérard Blot)
12 Peter Paul Rubens, Andromeda, ca 1638, oil on canvas,
188.6 x 93.8 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
(Photo © bpk / Gemäldegalerie, SMB/Jörg Anders)
13a–d Jacob Le Blon, female head in various stages of colouring,
palette, from Coloritto; or the Harmonie of Colouring (1725),
figures 3, 4, 6, 7, colour mezzotints, 28 x 22 cm each.
(Photo © The British Library Board 561*.d.19)
14 Peter Paul Rubens, Bacchanal (Drunken Silenus), ca 1616/25,
oil on wood, 212 x 214.5 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
(Photo © bpk / Bayrische Staatsgemäldesammlungen)
15 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of a Man of Letters (formerly
identified as Diderot), ca 1769, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, Musée
du Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du
Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda)
16 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of a Man (identified as the Abbé
de Saint-Non), ca 1769, oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm, Musée du
Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) /
Franck Raux)
17 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of a Woman (formerly identi-
fied as Marie-Madeleine Guimard), ca 1769–70, oil on canvas,
81.5 x 65 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand
Palais (musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda)
8 Jacques-Louis David, Self-Portrait in Prison, 1794, oil on canvas,
81 x 64 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand
Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot)
viii Illustrations
19 Jacques-Louis David, Jacobus Blauw, 1795, oil on canvas,
92 x 73 cm. (Photo © The National Gallery, London)
10 Anne-Louis Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Belley, 1797, oil on canvas,
159 x 112 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo ©RMN-Grand
Palais (Château de Versailles) / Gérard Blot)
11 Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Negress, 1800, oil
on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo ©
RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot)
12 Jan Ladmiral, Fragments of skin and thumb, colour mezzotint with
etching, from Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, Dissertatio secunda de
sede et caussa coloris Aethiopium et caeterorum hominum, 1737,
11.7 x 16.3 cm. (Photo © Wellcome Library, London)
13 Pierre Mignard, Louise Renée de Penancoët de Kéroualle,
Duchess of Portsmouth, 1682, oil on canvas, 120.7 x 95.3 cm.
(Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London)
14a Bosq after Jean-Galbert Salvage, skeleton drawn after the Borghese
Gladiator, from Anatomie du Gladiateur combattant, 1812, plate 8,
engraving printed in red and black ink, 31.5 x 35.5 cm (platemark).
(Photo © Wellcome Library, London)
14b Bosq after Jean-Galbert Salvage, interior muscles, drawn after
the Borghese Gladiator, from Anatomie du Gladiateur combat-
tant, 1812, plate 10, engraving in red and black ink, 32.5 x 35.5 cm
(platemark). (Photo © Wellcome Library, London)
15 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Baigneuse de Valpinçon, 1808,
oil on canvas, 146 x 97 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo ©
RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot)
16 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Caroline Rivière, 1805–6, oil
on canvas, 100 x 70 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo ©
RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda)
17 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Marie-Françoise Rivière (detail),
1805, oil on canvas, 116 x 90 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo
© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage)
Figures
1.1 Screen shot from Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, 2011,
El Deseo S. A., 1:38:00 page 2
1.2 Screen shot from Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In, 2011,
El Deseo S. A., 1:46:56 3
2.1 After Gérard de Lairesse, Skin and its appendages, from Govard
Bidloo, Anatomia humani corporis, 1685, table 4, engraving,
43.5 x 27 cm (platemark). (Photo © Wellcome Library, London) 16
Illustrations ix
2.2 Melchior Meier, The Flaying of Marsyas, 1581, engraving,
23 x 31.2 cm, British Museum, London. (Photo © The Trustees
of the British Museum) 20
2.3 Il Guercino (school of), Della sculturasi, della pittura no, black
chalk, pen and brown wash on paper, 26.9 x 20.1 cm, Musée du
Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) /
Michèlle Bellot) 26
2.4 Charles Le Brun, Surprise Mixed with Fear, black chalk, pen and
ink on paper, 13 x 9.5 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
(Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Droits
réservés) 31
2.5 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette,
1758, oil on canvas, 81.2 x 64.5 cm, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard
Art Museum, Cambridge/Mass. (Photo © Fogg Art Museum,
Harvard Art Museums, USA/Bridgeman Images) 34
2.6–2.7 Jacob Le Blon, female head printed in black and white,
female plaster head, from Coloritto; or the Harmonie of
Colouring (1725), figure 1–2, mezzotints, 28 x 22 cm each.
(Photo © The British Library Board 561*.d.19) 37
2.8 Microscopic view of silk and of watered silk, Robert Hooke,
Micrographia, 1665, scheme 3, engraving, 29 x 19 cm.
(Photo © Wellcome Library, London) 43
2.9 Georg Pencz, Touch (from a series of Five Senses), ca 1544,
engraving, 7.7 x 5.1 cm, British Museum, London.
(Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum) 44
2.10 After Gérard de Lairesse, Flayed back of a woman, from Govard
Bidloo, Anatomia humani corporis, 1685, table 27, engraving,
49 x 28 cm (platemark). (Photo © Wellcome Library, London) 48
2.11 After Gérard de Lairesse, microscopic structure of skin, from
Govard Bidloo, Anatomia humani corporis, 1685, detail of table 4,
engraving, ca 6 x 8 cm. (Photo © Wellcome Library, London) 50
2.12 Gérard de Lairesse, microscopic structure of skin, ink and wash
drawing, ca 6.2 x 8.3 cm, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé,
Paris. (Photo © BIU Santé/ R. Caussimon) 50
2.13 Multiple views of the papillae of the dermis, from Govard
Bidloo, Vindiciae quarundam delineationum anatomicarum, 1697,
engraving, 12.7 x 15 cm (platemark). (Photo © Wellcome Library,
London) 51
3.1 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of a Man of Letters (formerly
identified as Diderot; detail of head), ca 1769, oil on canvas,
81 x 65 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais
(musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojéda) 64
