BODILY AND PICTORIAL SURFACES: SKIN IN FRENCH ART AND MEDICINE, 1790–1860

BODILY AND PICTORIAL SURFACES: SKIN IN FRENCH ART AND MEDICINE, 1790–1860

Mechthild Fend

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.

Art History

Volume 28 Issue 3, Pages 311 - 339

Published Online: 5 Jul 2005

© Association of Art Historians 2010