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

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).