Fleshing out Surfaces. Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1700-1900

Skin is the largest organ of the human body and the site of the sense of touch. It forms the threshold between the inner and outer body and is today considered on the one hand as an intimate envelope of the self and on the other an organic mantle crucial for the visible and public appearance of a person. When representing a body (be it a nude or a portrait that usually features at least the skin of face and hands) the artist is inevitably confronted with the task of depicting skin. This aspect of figurative representation has been largely taken for granted within the discipline of art history and has come into focus mostly where skin takes on an iconographic significance, as in depictions of the flaying of Marsyas or Saint Bartholomew. When the skin is not explicitly part of the subject matter, its particular character goes unremarked and it is generally viewed either as an element of the artist's individual facture or a feature of a period style.
In contrast to this, my study seeks to analyse the different ways of rendering the body's surface or borderlines beyond stylistic terms and stresses the symbolic and signifying dimensions of skin. It investigates the diverse renderings of skin as manifestations of competing ideas about the body's surface and links these visual notions articulated in paintings, drawings and prints to historically shifting ideas of skin as they were formulated in art theoretical or medical discourse. In elaborating on these correspondences the project does not wish to claim that artistic representations of the human body are illustrations of medical knowledge. On the contrary, the images are considered as visual articulations and themselves producers of a specific knowledge about the human body's envelope.
The focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth century is founded on the assumption of a gradual shift in the perception of and in the practices around the human body between the early modern era and the emergence of the culture of bourgeois modernity. Following up on historians of the body, especially Michael Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Dorinda Outram and Philipp Sarasin but also on recent works on the cultural history of skin, such as Claudia Benthien's Skin. On the cultural border between self and the world (2002) or Steven Connor's The Book of Skin (2004) the argument is that there is, during this period, a new focus on the surface and the borderlines of the body and a new understanding of the skin as a demarcation of the self. Another important shift is the move from humoral theory describing skin as a membrane for the exchange of fluids to vitalist physiology that refers to skin as a sensitive organ and as an interface reciprocally transmitting information from inside to outside. Skin thus achieved the function of a medium and was metaphorically related to an image when skin is described as canvas (in medical literature) and canvas as skin (in art literature). This conjunction lends skin a metapictorial dimension. I investigate these issues through an analysis of art discourse, medical literature and artistic anatomy as well as through a set of case studies each concentrating on a group of art works which - in my eyes - do not only depict skin, but are also about skin. The focus is on portraits by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Marie-Guillemine Benoit as well as by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The argument is that skin is not just any surface an artist can represent, but a highly overdetermined one, since it is via the fleshtones that many artists tried to render a painted body lifelike. At the same time, the artistically crafted skin can also be a site where representation becomes self-aware, where paintings reflect about their own quality as more or less signifying surfaces.