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

皮肤是人体最大的器官，是触觉的场所。它构成了内在和外在身体之间的门槛，今天一方面被认为是自我的亲密信封，另一方面被认为是对一个人可见和公开的外表至关重要的有机外衣。在表现身体时(无论是裸体还是肖像画，通常至少是面部和手的皮肤)，艺术家不可避免地要面对描绘皮肤的任务。在艺术史学科中，具象表现的这一方面在很大程度上被认为是理所当然的，主要是在皮肤具有肖像意义的地方成为焦点，比如在描绘马西亚斯或圣巴塞洛缪的剥皮时。当皮肤没有明确地成为题材的一部分时，它的特殊性质就没有被注意到，它通常被视为艺术家个人创作的一个元素或一个时代风格的特征。与此相反，我的研究试图分析身体表面或边界线的不同呈现方式，超越风格术语，强调皮肤的象征和象征维度。它研究皮肤的不同渲染，作为关于身体表面的相互竞争的想法的表现，并将这些在绘画、素描和版画中阐明的视觉概念与历史上不断变化的皮肤概念联系起来，因为它们是在艺术理论或医学话语中形成的。在详细阐述这些对应关系时，该项目并不想声称人体的艺术表现就是医学知识的例证。相反，这些图像被认为是视觉表达，它们本身就是关于人体包络的特定知识的生产者。对18世纪和19世纪的关注建立在对人体的认识和实践在早期现代时代和资产阶级现代性文化的出现之间逐渐转变的假设上。跟进身体历史学家，特别是迈克尔·巴赫金、米歇尔·福柯、多琳达·乌特伦和菲利普·萨拉辛，以及最近关于皮肤文化史的著作，如克劳迪娅·本西安的皮肤。关于自我与世界(2002)或史蒂芬·康纳的《皮肤之书》(2004)之间的文化边界，争论的焦点是，在这一时期，人们对身体的表面和边界有了新的关注，并对皮肤作为自我的界限有了新的理解。另一个重要的转变是，从体液理论将皮肤描述为液体交换的膜，到生命生理学，将皮肤视为敏感的器官，并将其视为从内到外相互传递信息的界面。因此，当皮肤被描述为画布(在医学文学中)，画布被描述为皮肤(在艺术文学中)时，皮肤就实现了媒介的功能，并被比喻为图像。这种结合给皮肤带来了一种超自然的维度。我通过对艺术话语、医学文学和艺术解剖学的分析，以及通过一系列案例研究来研究这些问题，每个案例研究都集中在一组艺术作品上，在我看来，这些作品不仅描绘皮肤，而且还与皮肤有关。重点是让-奥诺雷·弗拉戈纳德、雅克-路易斯·大卫、安妮-路易斯·吉罗德和玛丽-吉列明·伯努瓦以及让-奥古斯特-多米尼克·英格雷斯的肖像画。他们的论点是，皮肤不是艺术家可以代表的任何表面，而是一种高度过分确定的表面，因为许多艺术家试图通过Fleshtone来使绘制的身体栩栩如生。与此同时，精心制作的皮肤也可以是一个自我表现变得有意识的地方，在那里，绘画反映出自己的品质，或多或少是有意义的表面。

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.