Description
Book SynopsisA strong and insightful work which argues that skin is not just any surface an artist can represent, but a highly overdetermined one. Focusing on five French painters - Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoit and Ingres - it spans the fields of history of art and of medicine.
Trade Review‘Fleshing out Surfaces makes for a rich and fascinating read. Fleshing out Surfaces contributes significantly to a growing body of work on the history of representing human skin in art and science by scholars such as Mieneke te Hennepe and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, among others.’
Marieke M. A. Hendriksen - A Journal of eighteenth-century art and culture, March 2018
‘Fleshing Out Surfaces is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the cultural construction of the body and the theory and practice of portraiture. Fend’s focus on the representation of skin, and the connections she makes between medical and anatomical treatises, Enlightenment philosophical considerations of body and self, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic theory provide a productive vocabulary for talking about portraiture, and indeed about visual culture more broadly.’
Amy Freund, Oxford Art Journal
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Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. The surface's substance
2. Nervous canvas
3. Limite sensitive
4. Skin colour
5. Seeing through the skin
6. Hermetic borderline
7. Epilogue: segregation
Index
