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

皮肤是人体最大的器官，也是触觉的场所。它形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一个亲密的信封，另一方面是一个有机的外套，对一个人的可见和公开的外观至关重要。当表现一个身体（无论是裸体还是通常至少有脸部和手部皮肤的肖像）时，艺术家不可避免地面临着描绘皮肤的任务。在艺术史的学科中，这方面的具象表现在很大程度上被认为是理所当然的，并且在皮肤具有图像学意义的地方，如在对马叙亚斯或圣巴塞洛缪剥皮的描述中，这方面的具象表现大多受到关注。当皮肤不是明确的主题的一部分时，它的特殊性就不被注意到，它通常被视为艺术家个人制作的一个元素或一个时期风格的一个特征。与此相反，我的研究试图分析不同的方式来渲染身体的表面或边界超出文体术语，并强调皮肤的象征性和象征性的维度。它调查了皮肤的不同渲染作为关于身体表面的竞争思想的表现形式，并将绘画，素描和版画中表达的这些视觉概念与艺术理论或医学话语中制定的皮肤历史转变思想联系起来。在阐述这些对应关系时，该项目并不希望声称人体的艺术表现是医学知识的例证。相反，这些图像被认为是视觉表达，它们本身是关于人体外壳的特定知识的生产者。对世纪的关注是建立在这样一个假设的基础上的，即从近代早期到资产阶级现代性文化的出现，对人体的看法和围绕人体的实践逐渐发生了变化。跟进身体的历史学家，特别是迈克尔·巴赫金，米歇尔·福柯，多琳达·奥特拉姆和菲利普·萨拉辛，以及最近关于皮肤文化史的作品，如克劳迪娅·本西安的皮肤。在自我与世界的文化边界（2002年）或史蒂芬康纳的皮肤之书（2004年）的论点是，在这一时期，有一个新的重点是表面和身体的边界，并对皮肤作为自我的分界线有了新的理解。另一个重要的转变是从将皮肤描述为液体交换的膜的体液理论转移到将皮肤称为敏感器官和将信息从内部传递到外部的界面的活力生理学。因此，皮肤实现了媒介的功能，并且当皮肤被描述为画布（在医学文献中）和画布被描述为皮肤（在艺术文献中）时，皮肤与图像有隐喻性的联系。这种结合赋予皮肤一种抽象的维度。我通过对艺术话语、医学文献和艺术解剖学的分析，以及通过一系列案例研究来探讨这些问题，这些案例研究集中在一组艺术作品上，在我看来，这些艺术作品不仅描绘皮肤，而且也是关于皮肤的。重点是让-奥诺雷·弗拉戈纳尔、雅克-路易大卫、安妮-路易·吉罗代和玛丽-吉勒明·伯努瓦以及让-奥古斯特-多米尼克·安格尔的肖像画。他们的论点是，皮肤不是艺术家可以表现的任何表面，而是一个高度超定的表面，因为许多艺术家试图通过肤色来使一个被画的身体栩栩如生。与此同时，艺术制作的皮肤也可以是一个网站，在那里代表成为自我意识，在那里绘画反映了自己的质量或多或少的象征性表面。

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.