Output details

Toile nerveuse: Rendre la peau dans les 'Portraits de fantaisie' de Fragonard

Contribution and context: This chapter is one of two art historical essays in an edited inter-disciplinary volume on the subject of court and body culture. Fend argues that Fragonard’s paint handling – often associated with courtly sprezzatura - marks a transitional moment between the corporeal culture of the court and more modern notions of (bodily) self-expression. The essay is part of Fend’s larger research interests in skin and in the relations between visual, scientific and philosophical discourses.

According to mid-eighteenth-century art literature, there were precise ideas about how artists should re-produce skin texture with their brush. It was a historical moment when medical discourse – where the textile metaphor ‘tissue’ had just started to be applied to organic substances – and art literature came together in an understanding of skin as a crafted fabric. The essay focuses on Fragonard’s fantasy portraits, discussed in relation to Enlightenment philosophical and medical discourse on skin as the site of touch and the idea of a ‘nervous canvas’ (as the term was used in D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encylopédie), imbued with sensibility.